Three Tips To Prevent Someone From Tripping On Your Private Sidewalk

Marvin Simmons

Whether you want to deal with it or not, the sidewalk on your private property deserves your care and attention. If you neglect performing necessary maintenance on your sidewalk, either you or someone passing by is likely to trip on it eventually. Once you've decided to proactively reduce the risk of someone tripping on your sidewalk, these three tips will come in handy.

Immediately Repair Sloped Or Elevated Sidewalk Panels

A common cause of sidewalk trips and falls is inconsistent sidewalk panel elevations. Even if everything else about your sidewalk is perfectly fine, a slightly raised sidewalk panel only needs to trip up one person to ruin your day.

Since sidewalk panels are fairly thick, it's possible to get a concrete cutting and manipulation service to grind down all your raised panels so that they're even with the ground. For lowered panels, a crowbar can be used. Since this is physically demanding work with a lot of risk for error, you're better off hiring a contractor rather trying to figure out how to use all the equipment involved.

Place Shrubs In Empty Dirt Patches Around Your Sidewalk

Dirt is another common source of accidents. Dirt on an uneven sidewalk makes it easier for someone's foot to slip around and collide with an elevated panel. Even on a perfectly smooth sidewalk, dirt can cause a careless person that's jogging down your sidewalk to suddenly lose balance and fall.

To combat the spread of loose dirt from the ground around your sidewalk, plant shrubs with thick roots everywhere you can. While this won't completely eliminate dirt buildup on your sidewalk, the shrubs will make the ground they stand on firmer and significantly reduce the rate of dirt displacement. Grass is also a great way to keep loose soil from being scattered around.

Realign Or Replace Panels That Don't Form A Straight Line

Over time, sidewalk panels have a tendency to detach from what they're connected to and drift in one direction or another. Even if these panels aren't yet sloped enough to require immediate action, it's still a good idea to realign them with the rest of your sidewalk if you want to prevent future trouble.

Realigning a panel will be a much easier job for your contractor than grinding or cutting one down. Therefore, there's no need to worry about how daunting and expensive making your sidewalk straight again will be.

While reducing the risk of someone tripping on your sidewalk is an important goal, getting work done on your sidewalk panels is also great for improving your property's appearance. But even if you don't care about appearances, there's little reason to delay getting the necessary work done on your sidewalk Contact a company like concrete Coretech Industries for more information.


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