Watch this.
I changed the world.
I didn't mean to, but I did.
And when you do something that big, you make friends
and you make enemies and that's okay.
I go to bed every night knowing that what I've done
has always been for the right purpose, for the right reason.
I'm Russ Kendzior and I'm the guy
that kind of invented or developed
the slip and fall prevention industry.
Russell Kendzior is an expert witness.
He also runs a nonprofit called
the National Floor Safety Institute and he's based in Texas.
This is something I put my entire
background and experience in, and maybe
more importantly, my family's wealth.
I don't know how many lives I've saved,
but there's gotta be a lot of them.
There's gotta be a lot of people today
who haven't fallen or died or just been injured
because they walked on a floor that was protected.
This is a story on the micro-scale about friction,
that's the friction between the bottom of your foot
and a floor or walkway surface, but on the macro level,
it's also about the contention or the debate
about how you measure that friction.
There are many players with vested interests
in this and there are competing ways
to measure the friction of a floor.
The manufacturers of floors don't want liability.
No offense, but if your mother falls,
your grandmother falls, or somebody comes into your store
and falls and gets hurt, they don't really care.
I'm just being honest, the manufacturers of floors
could care less, they just don't wanna get sued.
There are no national standards
for measuring the coefficient of friction
for walkway surfaces, which is the technical way
of saying how slippery a floor is.
Private industry, really in every aspect of industry,
whatever manufactured product, they're perfectly capable
of coming up with safety standards.
In reporting this story, I certainly came away
with the impression that Russell Kendzior sees this
as a crusader standing up to Big Floor.
Falling is something of an epidemic in the United States.
It's one of the leading causes of preventable injuries
and costs tens of billions of dollars annually.
Flooring rhymes with boring and I think
that most people don't care about it,
but at the same time, it's right under our feet every day.
Everybody likes a shiny floor.
The floor maintenance industry has invested
billions and billions of dollars over decades
through marketing efforts to get us
to understand that shiny means good.
When you start to walk, you're basically
creating a series of micro slips.
If that micro slip turns into a macro slip
and you keep slipping, you're not able
to use postural control to then do the next step
and the next step, if you keep slipping,
you're going to fall, the slip
becomes a slide and a slide becomes a fall.
Baby boomers, I'm one of them,
retiring at a rate of 10,000 a day,
and what's the leading cause of injury
for the baby boomers? Slips, trips, and falls.
Slip, trip, and falls are the source
of a lot of litigation, they're also often seen
as the source of frivolous litigation.
Traditionally retailers haven't taken this seriously
because composite vinyl tiles are very cheap
and they cover acres of flooring in the United States
and it would be very expensive to fix.
Companies are paying tens of billions of dollars
in claims litigation. It's just a common problem.
And so you do the math and say,
"Well, how many people are going into a Walmart
or a Costco?" Pick a large retail store.
The cost of fixing the problem to many of these companies
is far more expensive than the cost of paying claims.
Russell Kendzior got his start as one of five children
outside of Chicago, graduated college
and became a floor salesman in the Dallas area.
As part of that job he started hearing from customers
that people were falling and getting hurt on the floors.
And he would call the company and say,
"You know, what should I tell these people?"
And according to Russ, the company
basically told him, "We can't help you,
You should just tell them to call our lawyers."
And he thought that was really odd so he eventually quit.
After running a floor cleaning business for awhile
he got a call from a lawyer who asked him
about testifying as an expert witness
so he started working as a consultant.
I'm not an advocate for plaintiffs' attorneys,
or defense attorneys, I'm a safety guy.
Floor safety begins with the floor.
And prior to the National Floor Safety Institute
publishing standards, the flooring industry
really didn't have any standards for slip resistance.
Russell Kendzior is a very persuasive person.
Because he's so persuasive,
I think he's made a lot of enemies.
Mr. Kendzior earns his living as a forensic consultant,
so that was a little bit of a problem for us.
Forensic consultants aren't absolutely
looking for a standard, they're looking
for a unique solution that they can sell.
My name is Peter Ermish, I'm the President
of Walkway Management Group, that is a new company
founded three years ago, committed to helping to solve
the problem of slip and fall injuries in our society.
We became deeply involved in creating
international standards that would solve the mystery
of slips and falls and make it really
a black and white issue that would allow people
at every level to monitor the safety of their floors
and solve the hazard problem if they detected one.
Triboluminescence is a phenomenon that describes
the spark of light that's created by friction.
A tribometer is a instrument that's used
to measure friction. These tend
to look like car battery-type boxes.
Others are sort of sleds that you drag across the floor.
Some of the tribometers in Europe
are actually inclined slopes.
There's also some that kind of resemble, like, feet.
There are a lot of different tools for measuring friction
and not all of them come up with the same reading.
Some organizations, including Russell Kendzior's
organization have put forward standards
for measuring the friction of floors but there's also
sort of no standard for developing standards
and in the United States, the development
of standards is overseen by an organization
called ANSI, American National Standards Institute.
Everybody calls it ANSI.
The lack of a federal standard, the lack of a uniform way
of going about getting a standard has created
this sort of vacuum, and in that vacuum, people see
an opportunity to come in and serve as experts.
The ceramic tile industry in the United States
put forth a standard with ANSI.
At present Peter Ermish's Walkway Management Group offers
the only tests to certify people to that industry standard.
And so the criticism is that really they are testing
to industry standard, not necessarily to the standard
that would prevent the most amount of injuries.
So if you go down the list of laminate floors,
luxury vinyl floors, all types of hard surface floors,
wood floors, all hard surface floors
today really have no standards.
Even though we've been publishing ours for decades,
they will not voluntarily adopt them.
In fact, the only industry that does have
a standard is the ceramic tile industry,
the Tile Council of North America, it's a trade association,
the TCNA is corporate America on steroids.
I mean, it's the largest manufacturers
in the world who manufacturer ceramic tile
who banded together to create a trade association
who now writes standards for themselves.
So it's not my standard or our standard.
They adopted the standard that's used in Europe.
It's the European Union standard recognized by 27 countries.
So it's not my standard, our role in that was that we
were aware of the research in Europe and we introduced
the Tile Council leadership to that research.
It's called ANSI A236.3 and it defines
the test methodology to determine whether a floor
is slippery and it also gave us a threshold.
So you take the digital numerical measurement
and you can either pass or fail.
I can tell you since this methodology has been commonly used
we're not aware of a single slip claim
that went to trial or even made it past discovery.
And the reason for that is it's so thorough.
and the report is so compelling and convincing
that the opposing attorney says, "You know,
I don't think we can win this case."
Basically we are present in every major city in the country.
If you have a problem, you think you have a problem,
you can call one of our affiliates and they can measure
the problem and they can remove the problem
and they can train your staff how to keep the floor safe.
The cleaning process should be part of the solution.
But often if you use the wrong cleaner,
you're actually turning a safe floor into a slippery floor.
So we have to educate the public.
We're talking about solving a problem for $60.
Now, since Peter Ermish started Walkway Management Group
they said they've opened 48 franchises.
Thank you, Acting Commissioner Buerkle and fellow
commissioners for the opportunity to speak to you, today.
As part of Russell Kendzior's advocacy, he has put forward
two petitions before the Consumer Product Safety Commission,
which is the federal agency that oversees
products and attempts to prevent injuries.
His most recent petition was in 2020 last year.
We petitioned them twice asking that they mandate
manufacturers of floor coverings to
test and label their products, twice,
and lost by a single vote both times.
And that was with insurmountable pressure
from all the manufacturers of floor coverings.
There was a period
where people could comment and I think the comments
are sort of revealing in who sides with Russ,
people like consumer advocacy groups
and who opposed him. There were other people
that sell tribometers that also felt
like the petition was self-interested.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard,
"Of course we have a lot of people slipping
and falling, Russ, that's why we have insurance!"
Now you go to the insurance industry.
They don't want to hear that, they're paying the claims.
But as long as corporate America says, "Well, we're just
passing the cost along to the insurance company
and when our premiums go up, we just pass
that cost along to you, the consumer."
Some of the things that Russell Kendzior
says are not easy to check, but one of the things
he said when I first called him, was that,
"Peter, when you start calling around asking people
for comment, they're going to just say,
'No thank you, goodbye,'" and that was
one of the things that did in fact, check out.
If you were to contact any casino, any grocery store,
any large retail store, any hospital, and say,
"I'm doing a story about slips and falls,
I'd like to get you behind the camera
and talk about it," you won't get a return call.
They don't want to talk about it, but why not?
I mean, it's a big problem and the reason
they don't wanna talk about it is because
if they talk about it, that means they know it's a problem.
Walmart did not respond to comment.
A Costco spokesperson said they had no comment.
I contacted CNA, which is one of the leading insurers
of retailers, they initially agreed to take my questions,
but then said they had no comment.
What is the definition of an accident?
If you would say, well, we had an accident on aisle three,
a lady slipped and fell on some water.
Well, first of all, that's not an accident,
that's an incident because accidents
are not predictable and not preventable.
From the minute we took our first steps we all have
personal experience falling, slipping, and falling.
And as we age that comes back to haunt us.
Elderly people are just deadly,
deathly afraid of slipping and falling.
They all know somebody that's in a nursing home
or died, had a hip replacement, they lost their life.
They lost their quality of life because of a slip and fall.
So they are reluctant to leave the house.
They don't want to go out because they're
afraid they might slip and fall.
What we want to do is let these people,
let the elderly Americans live their life,
live a full life, go out, but that takes commitment.
That takes industry commitment.
Manufacturers of floors have to buy into that message.
They don't.