Am I liable for my neighbors damages?
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My family lives in an upstairs apartment. The other night around 1230am we discovered that our toilet was overflowing and running, there was about an inch of water on the bathroom floor and had began to come out of the bathroom on to the carpet. We immediately turned off the water and began to clean it up. Our first concern was that it had leaked into the apartment below us, but we had not had a knock on our door telling us as much. We thought we had caught it in time. So we turned the toilet water off, cleaned up the mess and went to bed. Turns out it did leak, and the next day our neighbor informed us that there was a huge mess and that tons of her stuff was ruined. The maintainance man also came up to repair our toilet and in the process overflowed our toilet again, claiming in the the 13 years of his doing maintainance he had never seen a toilet do this. Today 4 days after the incident we recieved a letter from our neighbor who lives below us claiming that she thinks we are responsible for the $600 or so in damages it did to her stuff. She claims that we were negligent in not coming to get her when it overflowed and that because of that we are responsible. Is my family responsible for a faulty toilet?
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My family lives in an upstairs apartment. The other night around 1230am we discovered that our toilet was overflowing and running, there was about an inch of water on the bathroom floor and had began to come out of the bathroom on to the carpet. We immediately turned off the water and began to clean it up. Our first concern was that it had leaked into the apartment below us, but we had not had a knock on our door telling us as much. We thought we had caught it in time. So we turned the toilet water off, cleaned up the mess and went to bed. Turns out it did leak, and the next day our neighbor informed us that there was a huge mess and that tons of her stuff was ruined. The maintainance man also came up to repair our toilet and in the process overflowed our toilet again, claiming in the the 13 years of his doing maintainance he had never seen a toilet do this. Today 4 days after the incident we recieved a letter from our neighbor who lives below us claiming that she thinks we are responsible for the $600 or so in damages it did to her stuff. She claims that we were negligent in not coming to get her when it overflowed and that because of that we are responsible. Is my family responsible for a faulty toilet?
