Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Oklahoma

Re: negligence

Your potential liability may be based on the language of your written lease. You may have contracted to assume a duty to prevent just the type of thing which happened. Your liability might also be based on the common law theory of Negligence. Negligence is basically a failure to exercise reasonable care to avoid a foreseeable harm. Without researching the common law to answer your question would be difficult. But as a general rule I would think that the law would find that you had a duty to maintain your appliances in reasonbly fit condition to avoid the type of harm which was caused. You might also have had a duty to periodically inspect. On the other hand if the hose was not in such condition that an inspection would have revealed its likelihood of rupturing and you therefore had no notice of something which a reasonable person might conclude was requiring of replacement, then you may not have been negligent. At this point neither you or the landlord know what caused the hose to rupture. The condition, age, appearance, etc of the hose might shed some light on the various theories of the cause of rupture. Expert testimony would likely be required to determine the cause.