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Horvitz & Levy convinced the Court of Appeal to affirm summary judgment in favor of a public irrigation district in a high exposure wrongful death case based on governmental “canal immunity.”  The opinion created new precedent as the first case to interpret an immunity statute that will benefit all public irrigation districts as well as the State of California. 

This case arises from a wrongful death action initiated after the decedents lost control of their vehicle, veered off a public roadway, and landed upside down in a nearby irrigation drain owned by private property owners. The car’s occupants were unable to exit the overturned vehicle and drowned in the drain.  The decedents’ heirs sued various public entities for dangerous condition of public property, including the county that controlled the road and our client, Oakdale Irrigation District (the District). The plaintiffs alleged that the irrigation drain, the roadway, and/or the distance or the lack of barriers between them constituted a dangerous condition of public property.  The trial court granted summary judgment for the District based on Government Code section 831.8, subdivision (b), which provides immunity to an irrigation district or the state from a claim based on a personal injury caused by a condition of an irrigation drain “if at the time of the injury the person injured was using the property for any purpose other than that for which the district or state intended it to be used.”  Plaintiff appealed, and the District retained Horvitz & Levy to defend the summary judgment.

Horvitz & Levy persuaded the Court of Appeal to affirm and issue the first published opinion to construe this statute.  The plaintiffs argued that the inclusion of the word “using” meant that immunity was limited to instances in which a person “volitionally interacted” with an irrigation drain.  The Court of Appeal, however, agreed with Horvitz and Levy’s argument that the provision defines the breadth of immunity negatively, i.e., by indicating that immunity would apply to any and all circumstances in which the injured party was not using the property as the district or state intended.  As the court concluded, this interpretation furthered the Legislature’s intent to strike a balance that requires irrigation districts and the state to bear the expense of making irrigation drains safe for their intended uses but not for other remote, less foreseeable, or unforeseeable uses that could occur.  The court held immunity applied because the plaintiffs were not using the drain for irrigation purposes.