In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, approximately thirty landowners in Matagorda County sued neighboring landowner Tenaris Bay City Inc. (“Tenaris”), alleging that the construction of Tenaris’s manufacturing facility caused their homes to flood during Hurricane Harvey. Following a two-week jury trial in August 2021 in Harris County’s 295th Judicial District Court, Judge Donna Roth presiding, the jury returned a mixed verdict resulting in a $2.8 million judgment against Tenaris. The Fourteenth Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment, but then the Supreme Court of Texas granted review.

On May 23, 2025, the Supreme Court of Texas reversed and rendered judgment for Tenaris on all claims. The Court concluded that there was legally insufficient evidence of but-for causation—i.e., that the plaintiffs’ homes would not have flooded but for Tenaris’s construction activities.

The crux of the opinion was shaped by the testimony of the plaintiffs’ expert hydrologist at trial. As the Texas Supreme Court summarized, he “candidly admitted he had not attempted to determine the effect of Tenaris’s facility on any of the subject properties, and he had not attempted to determine whether any of the properties would have suffered comparable flood damage in the absence of the facility’s alleged defects.” Accordingly, his testimony did not “support[] the conclusion that Tenaris’s defectively designed facility was a but-for cause of the flood damage suffered at the properties in question.” The expert’s testimony was also “fundamentally unreliable” because he “made no attempt at all to exclude the exceptional hurricane itself and other environmental factors in the region that might plausibly have caused the plaintiffs’ damages irrespective of any contribution the Tenaris plant made to flooding in the area.”

Also of note is that the Court emphasized the need for expert testimony in complex flooding cases: “There are surely flooding cases in which the cause of flooding is straightforward enough that a factfinder may permissibly rely only on lay testimony when asked whether the defendant caused the plaintiff’s flooding. This was not remotely such a case.” That lack of expert testimony on but-for causation was fatal to the plaintiffs’ case.

In sum, this opinion sheds light on several increasingly important issues given the deluge of flooding litigation in Texas, most notably the evidentiary showing necessary to prove causation in these circumstances. Tenaris was represented by Ty Buthod and Laura McGonagill in the lower court proceedings, along with Tom Phillips and Mark Little (argued) on appeal.

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