That's an interesting question, especially in light of some of the high-profile incidents that have taken place over the past couple of years. Examples of the types of headline-grabbing cases that spring to mind include:
Still, while these dramatic instances of casino injury all grabbed the headlines, they are of course the types of rare and isolated events that affect a minuscule number of the city's 36 million-or-so annual visitors.
That's not to say more mundane mishaps don't occur with some regularity, however -- perhaps not so surprising when you consider the vast number of visitors, many of them unfamiliar with their surroundings, often in some state of intoxication or fatigue or both, in buildings designed, to some extent, to disorient the unsuspecting in an attempt to keep guests captive longer on the casino floor. Slippery floors, scuffed carpets (especially in unfamiliar high-heeled party shoes), unnoticed obstacles, busy escalators and elevators, construction and maintenance zones -- all of these can be potentially dangerous, if rarely to the degree of being life-or-limb threatening.
It's not just guests who get injured, either; we happened to hear a former dealer on local radio a week or so ago relating how on more than one occasion she'd been hurt when grabbed by the hair and pulled across the blackjack table by a violent or intoxicated player on a bad losing streak.
To get a read on how frequently the more mundane types of mishaps occur, we placed a call to a local law firm that advertises "Casino Accidents" as one of its specialties, and were informed by a very helpful attorney that so-called "slip and falls" account for about a quarter of his firm's annual business. Wow. He gave us a guesstimate of perhaps 100 accidents a month, of various degrees of severity, being reported from casino locations citywide (and those are just the ones that are significant enough to involve an attorney).
For example, we read of a case highlighted on a different local firm's website, which had resulted in them winning an award of $350,000 for a 44-year-old female client who tripped and fell over a metal object protruding from a coin cart on the casino floor. The woman suffered a fractured wrist that required two surgeries.
This particular firm's website warns how casinos and hotels "have large-deductible insurance policies" and are "very skilled at defending cases involving a slip and fall accident and other personal injury claims." While the prevalence of surveillance cameras means that most mishaps are caught on tape, it's the job of the property's risk-management team to minimize a guest or member of staff's injury claim in any way they can and to deflect any responsibility in terms of negligence on the part of the property or its staff.
While the lawyers are of course in the business of fighting these sometimes negligent multi-million dollar businesses in order to extract as much compensation as possible for their clients, we have seen first-hand what the casinos are up against. While the same law firm's website boasts of how, "Our lawyers have obtained numerous settlements and verdicts in excess of $1 million for personal injury victims," the current writer has been privy to surveillance footage where scammers are actually seen to be "practicing" their life-threatening "accidents." One case in particular springs to mind, for example, where a woman fell down no less than a half-dozen times in the same spot before she and her partner were satisfied with the result being convincing enough to call security. With such opportunism rampant among all the genuine claims, it's perhaps no wonder that Nevada state laws place a great deal of responsibility on pedestrians to watch where they are going.
In this answer, we focused primarily on accidents involving casino patrons or employees; for a QoD concerning accidents that have occurred during production shows, see QoD 7/16/13, which you can find in the member-only Archives.
