Garcia v. Paramount Citrus Ass'n, Inc.

73 Cal.Rptr.3d 833

161 Cal.App.4th 321

Ignacio GARCIA, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. PARAMOUNT CITRUS ASSOCIATION, INC., Defendant and Appellant.

No. F050528.

Court of Appeal, Fifth District.

March 26, 2008.

Horvitz & Levy, John A. Taylor, Jr., Jeremy B. Rosen, Encino; Lynberg & Watkins, Dana Alden Fox, Los Angeles, Daniel G. Eskue; Law Offices of Oliver U. Robinson, Robinson & Keller and Oliver U. Robinson, Bakersfield, for Defendant and Appellant.

Daniel J. Popeo, Richard A. Samp and Paul F. Utrecht, San Francisco, for Washington Legal Foundation and Allied Educational Foundation as Amici Curiae on behalf of Defendant and Appellant.

Law Offices of Young & Nichols, Todd A. Gall, Bakersfield, and Thomas A. Brill, Los Angeles, for Plaintiff and Respondent.

Arkin & Glovsky and Sharon J. Arkin, Pasadena, for Consumer Attorneys of California as Amicus Curiae on behalf of Plaintiff and Respondent.

OPINION

VARTABEDIAN, Acting P.J.

This is an appeal from judgment entered on a jury verdict in favor of respondent Ignacio Garcia and against appellant Paramount Citrus Association, Inc. We will conclude the judgment must be reversed because, under the circumstances of this case, appellant owed no legal duty to respondent. Consequently, we will not reach the other issues presented by the parties and amici, concerning the award of damages in this case.¹

Facts and Procedural History

As relevant to this appeal and viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to respondent, the facts can be summarized as follows. Salud Andrade (Andrade) was a crew supervisor for a farm labor contractor in Tulare County. On April 2, 2001, Andrade had a crew picking oranges on the Burdick Ranch, which was adjacent to appellant's Abercrombie Ranch, which also consisted of citrus groves. Andrade, driving a three-quarter-ton flatbed truck and pulling a trailer, had delivered a forklift to his crew and was pulling the now-empty trailer as he went to another crew's worksite. Andrade wanted to get to Road 172, and he saw an oiled farm road he thought would lead directly to Road 172. He had never been on this farm road before, even though he had been working in the general area for several years and had driven on many other farm roads.

The farm road, sometimes referred to as Abercrombie Road, ran in an east-west direction between two sections of appellant's groves, then intersected with Road 172 before continuing between two other sections of grove on the west side of Road 172. Access to the road was blocked by cables except on days appellant's workers needed access to the property. The cables had been lowered at about 6 aim. on the day in question.

At about 7 a.m., Andrade drove west on Abercrombie Road at about 35 miles per hour, looking for Road 172. He apparently did not perceive Road 172 until his truck entered the roadway. Without slowing appreciably, he rammed a van in which respondent and other farm workers were being transported to a worksite. The van, which had been traveling at about 50 miles per hour, was knocked from the roadway and rolled over. Respondent was severely injured; he suffered brain damage and was rendered essentially paraplegic by the accident. (He had some limited use of his legs but could not walk a significant distance.)

Respondent sued appellant and other defendants, alleging that appellant owed a duty to him and others to place a warning on its private road alerting drivers to the approaching intersection with the public road. He alleged appellant breached that duty, causing his injuries.

Appellant's motion for summary judgment was denied, as was its motion for nonsuit made during trial. The jury returned a verdict finding appellant negligent, that the negligence was a cause of respondent's injuries, and that appellant was 35 percent responsible for the injuries. The court subsequently entered judgment against appellant in the amount of $1,637,226. Appellant filed a timely notice of appeal.

Discussion

Appellant contends it had no duty to respondent arising from the nonpermissive, negligent use of its property by a third party. In the circumstances of this case, we agree.

The existence' of a duty owed by a defendant to a plaintiff is a question of law for the court, reviewed de novo on appeal. In a posttrial procedural setting, we view the facts, where supported by substantial evidence, in the light most favorable to the plaintiff. (See Delgado v. Trax Bar & Grill (2005) 36 Cal.4th 224, 237, 245, 30 Cal.Rptr.3d 145, 113 P.3d 1159.)²

Generally, a landowner has a duty to act reasonably in the management of property "in view of the probability of injury to others." (Rowland v. Christian (1968) 69 Cal.2d 108, 119, 70 Cal.Rptr. 97, 443 P.2d 561.) "A landowner's duty of care to avoid exposing others to a risk of injury is not limited to injuries that occur on premises owned or controlled by the landowner. Rather, the duty of care encompasses a duty to avoid exposing persons to risks of injury that occur off site if the landowner's property is maintained in such a manner as to expose persons to an unreasonable risk of injury offsite." (Barnes v. Black (1999) 71 Cal.App.4th 1473,1478, 84 Cal.Rptr.2d 634.)³

In determining whether a duty should be imposed in a particular case, a court must consider the following factors in the circumstances of the case: the foreseeability of harm to the injured party, the degree of certainty that party has suffered injury, the closeness of the connection between the condition of the property and the injury, the moral blame attached to the landowner's conduct, the policy of preventing future harm, the extent of the burden the duty would impose compared to the benefit to the community from imposing the burden, and the practical availability of insurance for the risk involved (that is, cost, prevalence and availability of such insurance). (Rowland v. Christian, supra, 69 Cal.2d at p. 113, 70 Cal.Rptr. 97, 443 P.2d 561.) "Foreseeability and the extent of the burden to the defendant are ordinarily the crucial considerations, but in a given case one or more of the other Rowland factors may be determinative of the duty analysis." (Castaneda v. Olsher (2007) 41 Cal.4th 1205, 1213, 63 Cal. Rptr.3d 99,162 P.3d 610.)

The Supreme Court recently quoted with approval the following description of the way a court should approach the duty analysis: "`First, the court must determine the specific measures the plaintiff asserts the defendant should have taken to prevent the harm. This frames the issue for the court's determination by defining the scope of the duty under consideration. Second, the court must analyze how financially and socially burdensome these proposed measures would be to a landlord, which measures could range from minimally burdensome to significantly burdensome under the facts of the case. Third, the court must identify the nature of the third party conduct that the plaintiff claims could have been prevented had the landlord taken the proposed measures, and assess how foreseeable (on a continuum from a mere possibility to a reasonable probability) it was that this conduct would occur. Once the burden and foreseeability have been independently assessed, they can be compared in determining the scope of the duty the court imposes on a given defendant. The more certain the likelihood of the harm, the higher the burden a court will impose on a landlord to prevent it; the less foreseeable the harm, the lower the burden a court will place on a landlord.'" (Castaneda v. Olsher, supra, 41 Cal.4th at p. 1214, 63 Cal.Rptr.3d 99, 162 P.3d 610, quoting from Vasquez v. Residential Investments, Inc. (2004) 118 Cal.App.4th 269, 285, 12 Cal.Rptr.3d 846.)

A Respondent's Assertion of Appropriate Preventative Measures

Respondent does not assert specific preventative measures that should be taken by a rural landowner. From his various statements on the subject, we think a fair summary of his assertions would be this: Where traffic on a public road is not visible before a driver on a private road reaches the right-of-way of the public road, the owner of the private road is required to post a stop sign or a warning to notify drivers on the private road that there is a road crossing ahead.

Respondent would object that this summary statement is too broad. For example, he contends warnings must be placed only where "a visibility obstruction exists at points where private roads meet, and cross a public road." In the present case, however, the undisputed evidence was that the view along the public right-of-way itself was not obstructed, by appellant's trees or otherwise. In traditional "blind intersection" cases, the obstruction on the defendant's land has blocked the view of roadway users until they are actually in the intersection. (See, e.g., Carson v. Facilities Development Co. (1984) 36 Cal.3d 830, 838, 206 Cal.Rptr. 136, 686 P.2d 656 [location of sign required driver to enter intersection for clear view]; Swanberg v. O'Mectin (1984) 157 Cal.App.3d 325, 328, 203 Cal.Rptr. 701 [landlord's failure to "checkf ] to see ... whether the shrubs were growing out into the street and thus hindering traffic"]; Wisher v. Fowler (1970) 7 Cal.App.3d 225, 227, 86 Cal.Rptr. 582 [hedge obscured vision of drivers entering public road until they "were `in excess of 15 feet on the roadway'"].)⁴ Accordingly, we consider the issue of duty in the context of a failure to provide warning of an intersection that was obscured by appellant's trees only from a vantage point outside the public right-of-way.

In a similar manner, respondent seeks to narrow the scope of his proposed preventative measures by pointing to certain factors unique to the present case: (1) evidence supported a conclusion that the private and public roads were the same color and (2) there was evidence that the presence of a cable 200 feet beyond the public road on the continuation of Abercrombie Road could cause a driver's attention to be...