No I dont mean I guess... I work several dozen insurance adjusters with several firms. I hear their stories all the time.
You'd care if your makeshift elevator caused a personal injury or death and were bankrupted as a result of your unsafe actions.
Hey, I appreciate you trying to help, but you are in way over your head, and the concerns you're bringing up are wrong and not really rational.
1. You should have made it clear you were talking about injuries, not property losses.
2. You DEFINITELY guess.
You're a foreign layman, offering legal advice to me, an American attorney. Let me give you some tips. First, as we attorneys always say, free legal advice from an attorney is worth what you pay for it. Second, legal advice from lay people is even worse. Useless and VERY often dangerous.
I've also taken numerous semesters of calculus and post-calculus courses, and I know math well enough to understand the difference between a serious risk and a negligible risk.
You don't know what will be approved and what won't be. You are guessing. Every case is different (another thing they tell us in law school), and you don't know what will happen if my insurance company doesn't pay and I sue them. As a person who has litigated against insurance attorneys, I can tell you how that works in the States. They do a risk assessment, and then they settle unless they're positive they can't lose. Laymen think litigants are sure they know how cases will pan out because they can read a law or a contract and understand the plain language. That's totally untrue. It's a frustrating thing for lawyers to have to deal with. "I will win because the law says this." If it worked like that, they wouldn't make us go to college for an extra three years.
All this is irrelevant, though, because as a Canadian, you apparently don't understand how the American medical insurance system works. I am insured even if I injure myself deliberately. Negligent actions are always covered. They don't turn you away at the hospital because you didn't wear a safety belt.
My medical insurance covers me. The medical insurance of my guests insures them. Our government coerces people to be insured, and I don't hang around with the type of fringe people who don't pay up.
As for economic damages other than medical bills, I am content to face the near-zero risk.
All this assumes I am going to let other people run around in my shop and use whatever equipment they like. Why would you think that? I'm not running a factory. No one but me has been in my shop for the last month. Who is going to come to my shop and move things in and out of storage for me? Why would that happen? I wish it would. They could also pull my weeds and clean the driveway.
You're projecting concerns a big business would have onto a hobbyist who works alone in his backyard shop. In all likelihood, no one but me would ever use the elevator, and I am perfectly capable of keeping people off of it, just as I keep them away from the numerous guns in my house, the gunpowder, the razor-sharp knives, and so on. I can operate a lock.
Homes all over the US are full of dangerous things, including attic and garage lifts much more dangerous than the one I'm thinking of building, which are built by companies that have had the risks evaluated by attorneys. You should see some of the scary things they sell. These companies are sailing along just fine.
My pasture has holes a person could step into. It has trees that could fall on a person. I have a swimming pool, and pools attract lawsuits. I let my best friend use my tractor and front end loader, which are very dangerous and never inspected. I did most of my own shop wiring. I burn huge piles of dead trees and brush, and I let him help. I will let friends drive my cars, even though they might have safety problems I don't know about or which their lawyers might make up. I have slick oak stairs in my house. I let my friends' kids stay in upstairs bedrooms with windows they can get out of without keys. I have a pet that bites. I have dangerous tools sitting on mobile bases I made, and they could break and fall over. I don't worry about these things, and neither does anyone who visits my home. No one cares. Life is not completely safe.
One bad thing about the Internet is that people discourage each other needlessly. It's actually a pet peeve of mine. If I went to an average forum and said I was thinking of boiling an egg, someone might pop up, give me an LOL, and tell me how insane it was to boil an egg without a Nomex suit. I've seen this kind of thing over and over in my many years on forums.
I remember saying I was going to roast a pig over charcoals resting on a sheet of galvanized tin. Someone I knew, a real expert who moves in the rarefied air of the tool industry, got extremely angry at me because I dismissed his claims I and my guests would get very ill from zinc poisoning. He sarcastically called me "Earth's supreme intellect." That's how upset he was. We had a great Christmas Eve dinner, and, of course, no one had any problems at all, because he had no idea what he was talking about. He was in over his head. He was an expert in just about every type of industrial machinery, but he was no doctor, chemist, or safety expert. Still felt like going out of his lane with confidence.
There is a tiny, tiny chance anyone but me will get on the elevator. There is a tiny, tiny chance the elevator will have an accident. There is a tiny, tiny chance someone will be hurt. There is a tiny, tiny chance the injury will be serious enough to make a lawsuit feasible. There is a tiny, tiny chance that the kind of people who enter my shop would be inclined to sue their friend. When you multiply "tiny, tiny" by itself several times, you get something very close to zero. That's good enough for me.
I say let's lighten up a little and be realistic. If I took every unrealistic prediction of disaster seriously, I would sell my tools and everything else I enjoy and live in a bubble wrap cocoon. And like everyone else, I would still have problems, and I would still die of something eventually.
I'm not offering anyone else legal advice. Maybe everyone who puts an elevator in their shop after reading this will have several children die on it at once. I'm just saying I, personally, am willing to assume the infinitesimal risk of serious problems in exchange for the immense, certain benefit of good storage.
A good PI lawyer can go through any farm home like mine and find things that will make him drool. People still live on farms.
Hopefully now we can go back to the actual subject of the thread.
