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<title>PROPERTY RIGHTS: Litigation floods courts in wake of Harvey&#39;s historic deluge -- Monday, November 20, 2017 -- www.eenews.net
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  <article class="story full ee-row" id="story_1060066987">

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    <h2 class="slug">PROPERTY RIGHTS</h2>

    <h1 class="headline ">Litigation floods courts in wake of Harvey's historic deluge</h1>

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    <p class="authors"><a href="/staff/Amanda_Reilly">Amanda Reilly</a>, E&E News reporter</p>
    <time datetime="2017-11-20 13:07:57 -0500">Published: Monday, November 20, 2017</time>
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        <aside id="image_asset_layout_25023" class="left span16 image_asset_layout"><img src="https://www.eenews.net/image_assets/2017/11/image_asset_24825.jpg" alt="Houston flooding. Photo credit: South Carolina National Guard"><p class="caption">Litigation abounds after Hurricane Harvey caused flooding like this in Texas, thanks to a 2012 Supreme Court decision. <span class="credit">South Carolina National Guard</span></p></aside><p>Hurricane Harvey's catastrophic rains and flooding are long gone, but the litigation is just beginning.</p>


	<p>Property owners both upstream and downstream from two Houston-area reservoirs have inundated a Washington-based federal court with lawsuits over the Army Corps of Engineers' decision to open the spill gates of those reservoirs, the Barker and Addicks dams.</p>


	<p>More than 140 lawsuits — both individual and class-action suits — have been filed at the U.S. Court of Federal Claims so far. All those suits allege roughly the same thing: Flooding that followed the Army Corps' decision resulted in a government "taking" of property without compensation.</p>


	<p>"The volume of litigation coming out of Houston is totally unprecedented in my experience," said John Echeverria, a takings expert at Vermont Law School. "The magnitude of this litigation swamps anything that has come before."</p>


	<p>Legal experts say the flood of litigation likely flows from a unanimous 2012 Supreme Court decision in <em>Arkansas Game and Fish Commission v. United States</em> that temporary flooding could be considered a taking. In that case, the justices ruled the commission was owed compensation from the Army Corps for timber damage caused by flooding.</p>


	

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  <div class="ad_container" id="mobile_mediumStory_1060066987"></div></section><p>"I don't think anybody in the past would have thought of filing takings cases if it was just a one-time event. It just didn't amount to a taking," said Stephen Temmel, a senior adviser at Dawson &amp; Associates, a firm that specializes in water issues. "The Supreme Court opened it up to at least have to consider it."</p>


	<p>Making landfall as a Category 4 hurricane, Harvey dumped record amounts of rain on the Houston area in late August. A trillion gallons of water fell over a four-day period.</p>


	<p>The storm filled to capacity the Barker and Addicks dams, reservoirs built 70 years ago to control Buffalo Bayou, the river that runs through Houston. Together, they hold 140 billion gallons of stormwater. When the slow-moving storm finally left the city, the Army Corps instituted controlled water releases to prevent the structures from failing.</p>


	<p>The flooding damaged properties downstream, in some cases raising water levels 2 feet in a day, according to a class-action suit filed Sept. 5. Most homeowners didn't have flood insurance because they were told that the area was not in danger, the suit says.</p>


	<p>"Many home and business owners along Buffalo Bayou — who had never experienced flooding and were not in a known flood plain — believed they were safe and would recover. They were wrong," says the suit, filed by Bryant Banes at Neel Hooper &amp; Banes PC. "What Harvey had brought would now be superseded by the Corps' action."</p>


	<p>It's not only downstream property owners who faced damage. Upstream owners have also sued, arguing that the Army Corps waited too long to release water.</p>


	<p>Lawyers are eager to help residents file lawsuits.</p>


	<p>"If you were flooded in whole or part because of the release of the Addicks &amp; Barker Reservoir release, you have the right to be compensated," says Laminack Pirtle &amp; Martines LLP, one of the firms that has brought a class-action suit, on a website touting its services.</p>


	<p>The Court of Federal Claims typically handles dozens of cases each year brought under the takings clause. Along with cases in which owners allege the physical taking of their property, the court also hears claims that regulations amount to takings of private property.</p>


	<p>The sheer number of Harvey cases has stretched the court's takings caseload. To handle them, it has consolidated the claims under a master docket, to be managed by Chief Judge Susan Braden.</p>


	<p>"This slew of cases has by itself doubled the number of inverse condemnation cases being handled by the Department of Justice," Echeverria said.</p>


<h3>'Deluge of takings liability'</h3>

	<p>But how flooding fits into the takings clause is still an unsettled area of law, despite the 2012 Supreme Court decision in the <em>Arkansas Game and Fish</em> case that appears to have opened the door to the Harvey cases.</p>


	<p>In that case, Arkansas game managers charged that the Army Corps' management of a dam along the Black River resulted in new and different flooding in the Dave Donaldson Black River Wildlife Management Area, damaging the area's timber (<a href="https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/stories/1059973308/"><i>Greenwire</i></a>, Dec. 4, 2012).</p>


	<p>The lower courts dismissed the case on the grounds that an entity cannot recover compensation under the takings clause for a single flood. But the Supreme Court disagreed in a unanimous 8-0 opinion. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that "government-induced flooding temporary in duration gains no automatic exemption from Takings Clause inspection."</p>


	<p>"Before <em>Arkansas Game and Fish</em>, you were barred from bringing a taking claim based on flooding unless you could show that it was continuous or inevitably occurring," said Robert Meltz, special counsel at Defenders of Wildlife. "In the unanimous opinion by Ginsburg, they said it makes no sense at all. There's no reason you should be categorically barred from bringing a takings claim."</p>


	<p>The court laid out a test based on the severity of damages, the nature of the property, the circumstances in which flooding occurred and whether it was foreseeable that damage would occur as a result of government action.</p>


	<p>"The hot topic is trying to figure out what the 2012 decision in Arkansas Game and Fish actually means," said Robert Verchick, a professor at Loyola University New Orleans' College of Law who specializes in disaster law. "What the court did is it created a list of factors that are case-specific and designed to help a judge decide whether such a one-time temporary flood event could constitute a taking."</p>


	<p>In 2012, though, Supreme Court justices predicted their decision would not open the door to massive liability for the government for flooding.</p>


	<p>"Today's modest decision augurs no deluge of takings liability," Ginsburg wrote.</p>


	<p>But there's no question the decision changed the game in flooding and takings cases. In 2015, Braden of the Court of Federal Claims cited the ruling in finding that damage caused by flooding of the Army Corps' Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet navigation channel during 2005's Hurricane Katrina represented a taking (<a href="https://www.eenews.net/greenwire/stories/1060042001"><i>Greenwire</i></a>, Aug. 24, 2016).</p>


	<p>The outlet — best known as "MR-GO" — is a 76-mile channel built by the Army Corps in the 1960s as a shorter shipping route between the Gulf of Mexico and the Port of New Orleans.</p>


	<p>Braden wrote that the channel was a "ticking time bomb" that caused massive amounts of damage to property in St. Bernard Parish, La.</p>


<h3>Did the government pick winners and losers?</h3>

	<p>While it's difficult to predict the outcomes of takings cases, legal experts say several factors cut in the government's favor in the Harvey litigation.</p>


	<p>Most important, they say, is that there was nothing the government could have done to prevent flooding, given record rainfall.</p>


	<p>"'Unprecedented' is attached to Hurricane Harvey's name, so it's hard to say how you should have prepared for that," Verchick said.</p>


	<p>The Army Corps had no good options, said Dawson &amp; Associates' Temmel, who worked for the corps for 34 years, including serving 30 years as district counsel in Los Angeles.</p>


	<p>"You try to balance releasing waters as controlled as possible, so you're not flooding a lot of people downstream, but you're not backing up people upstream," Tremmel said. "In a lot of situations, it's a really hard act to figure out what to do."</p>


	<p>A 1928 Supreme Court case may also help boost the government's defense. In <em>Miller v. Schoene</em>, the court found that the government wasn't liable for damages when it destroyed ornamental cedar trees to save apple trees from a deadly fungus.</p>


	<p>Echeverria said the government can also argue that the city of Houston is at least partly at fault for allowing development in and around the reservoirs.</p>


	<p>"The city of Houston and other officials in Texas, I think, are as responsible for the flooding that occurred here as the Army Corps of Engineers," he said. "So why should taxpayers in Virginia and Minnesota be paying to compensate citizens in Texas?"</p>


	<p>Then there's the question of the Flood Control Act, which Congress first passed in 1928 in response to devastating Mississippi River floods. The law includes a line that says, "No liability of any kind shall attach to or rest upon the United States for any damage from or by floods or flood waters at any place."</p>


	<p>In other words, the government is immune from lawsuits for flooding damages. Legal experts agree that the law applies to tort claims, but since there haven't been that many takings cases, it's unclear to what extent the government is protected against takings claims.</p>


	<p>Lawyers who have brought the Harvey cases say they are not debating the decision to release waters from the dams — just attempting to compensate property owners for their losses.</p>


	<p>"At the end of the day, the government picked winners and losers in this terrible situation," Houston attorney Jorge Borunda wrote. "And it took the losers' properties and flooded them to preserve the winners' properties."</p>


<h3>Eyes on St. Bernard Parish appeal</h3>

	<p>In the short term, lawyers' eyes are turned to the St. Bernard Parish litigation. The government has appealed Braden's decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, where the case is pending.</p>


	<p>"Because all of these have been filed in the Court of Federal Claims, the prospects for success in those cases will depend largely, if not entirely, on the appeal," Echeverria said.</p>


	<p>The government argues in its appeal that, given Katrina's size, there would have been flooding no matter what the government did.</p>


	<p>"In writing its opinion, it's very likely that the federal circuit will say things that will be applied to the Harvey litigation," said Defenders of Wildlife's Meltz.</p>


	<p>Still, there are two key differences between that litigation and the lawsuits over Harvey flooding, said Loyola's Verchick.</p>


	<p>Unlike with Harvey, he said, damage was foreseeable in the Katrina case because the Army Corps knew the channel would fail during a hurricane "in the wrong place."</p>


	<p>And he said that there was a unique "moral dimension" to the Katrina case.</p>


	<p>"Not to say that there aren't a lot of sympathetic plaintiffs and that there were obviously a lot of suffering and damage [during Harvey], but so far we haven't seen the kind of callous disregard to public safety that we saw in the Katrina situation," Verchick said.</p>


<h3>Balancing public risks</h3>

	<p>The Court of Federal Claims has wrestled with a handful of other recent cases over the Army Corps' decisions related to flooding of the Mississippi River.</p>


	<p>"All of these cases, plus the 140 out of Hurricane Harvey in the Houston area, raise this question of what the Corps of Engineers is supposed to do in a huge amount of rain — or, in one case, there was snowmelt," Meltz said. "What happens when somebody has to be flooded?"</p>


	<p>Experts say these questions will become more significant as climate change increases the likelihood of massive flooding events.</p>


	<p>Harvey could be a harbinger of messy legal battles to come.</p>


	<p>"We need some kind of program or agreement about how to balance this public risk that so many people are bearing. Should the risk be borne by individual people or the government?" Verchick said.</p>


	<p>"Until we address that issue," he said, "then you're going to have discrete situations where plaintiffs just pick anything they can find out of the toolbox: a takings claim, a tort claim, a contract claim. ... We're just going to be having plaintiffs casting about for lawyers and claims they can use."</p>
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						<time datetime="2018-02-15 16:17:47 -0500" class="date">Thursday, February 15, 2018 <span>&mdash;&nbsp; 4:17&nbsp;PM</span></time>
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			<h2 class="slug pm">LAW</h2>
			<h1 class="headline">More than 100 climate lawsuits filed last year </h1>
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			<h2 class="slug pm">EPA</h2>
			<h1 class="headline">Senate Dems ask agency, GSA about Pruitt's travel </h1>
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			<h2 class="slug pm">CHESAPEAKE BAY</h2>
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			<h2 class="slug pm">CAMPAIGN 2018</h2>
			<h1 class="headline">Cramer poised to make Senate announcement tomorrow </h1>
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