The Supreme Court of Texas released a Per Curiam decision on friday regarding the 7 year long Barnes v Mathis case. (Per curiam means that the justices can enter the decision anonymously, as opposed to other decisions where they have to sign their names).
Dr. Lee Roy Mathis and H.E. “Buster” Barnes own adjoining property in Anderson County. Lake Creek runs through both tracts, and Mathis’s 1,254 acre property is located upstream from Barnes’s. Mathis maintained a wetlands complex on much of his land, which attracted beavers,waterfowl, and other wildlife. Barnes’s tract was used predominantly as a pasture. In September 2006, Barnes constructed an earthen road across the creek to more easily access his back pasture. To accommodate water flow in the creek, Barnes installed two twenty-eight-inch culverts, or drainage pipes, into the structure. In October 2006, Mathis noticed an elevated water level in the creek, which he suspected was caused by Barnes’s road. By November, Mathis noticed that creek water encroached onto his property, and he asked Barnes to modify the road. Barnes later installed an additional culvert into the structure. In December 2006, Mathis returned to his property after a twelve-day absence to discover that Barnes’s road was washed away. The flooding—and subsequent drainage—also affected over four hundred acres of Mathis’s property, damaging beaver dams, affecting the wildlife population, and draining the wetlands.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the first documented case EVER where damages were sought for destruction of beaver dams caused by flooding and not the other way round. I have asked our beaver-attorney friend for an opinion on this ruling but in the mean time here’s the PDF if you’d like to check it out for yourself. To my untrained eye it looks like the first time around the jury ruled “Mr Barnes may indeed have done something wrong but its not wrong enough that Dr. Mathis gets any money for it” and now it looks like the Texas Supreme Court ruled that it should go back and be retried at the appellate level, with some clarifications of terms.
But mind you, this is Texas. So anything could happen.
