Tenaris Bay City Inc. v Ellisor Texas May 23, 2025
Supreme Court of the
State of Texas
Court Staff Case Summaries May 23, 2025
This case concerns whether the plaintiffs established the actual causation element of their negligence claims.
Plaintiffs were 30 homeowners in Matagorda County.
Their homes flooded during Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
They sued Tenaris, a pipe manufacturer who operated a fabrication plant in Bay City.
Tenaris built its facility on land previously used as a sod farm. To prevent flooding, Tenaris hired Fluor Enterprises to design and build a drainage system on Tenaris’s property.
The system included detention ponds and a berm to minimize flooding of other properties.
Plaintiffs’ expert, an engineer, testified that the design of the drainage system was flawed.
Plaintiffs also offered evidence that the drainage system was not built to design specifications and had not been properly maintained.
The jury found for plaintiffs on theories of negligence, negligence per se, and negligent nuisance.
The trial court rendered a money judgment for plaintiffs.
The court of appeals affirmed.
The Supreme Court reversed and rendered judgment for Tenaris.
The Court held that all of plaintiffs’ negligence theories required proof of but-for causation.
There was legally insufficient evidence supporting this element.
Plaintiffs’ expert conceded that he had not determined whether the Tenaris facility had caused plaintiffs’ individual homes to flood.
He testified that he could have made this determination by conducting a multi-step analysis that traced runoff from Tenaris’s property to each plaintiff’s property, but that he had not done so.
The Court further held that expert testimony was required to prove causation in this case, and that there was no applicable exception to the ordinary requirement under Texas law that the plaintiff prove but-for causation in a negligence case.