60 Wash. 2d 404 - Buxel v. King County’s Empirical Analysis
1962
Citation profile
17 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 17 later decisions — most recently September 2010
17 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Wood v. City of Tacoma · Tierney v. Yakima County
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“A municipality ordinarily is not liable for consequential damages occurring when it increases the flow of surface water onto an owner's property if the damages arise wholly from changes in the character of the surface produced by the opening of streets, building of houses, and the like, in the ordinary and regular course of the expansion of the municipality. On the other hand, it is liable if, in the course of an authorized construction, it collects surface water by an artificial channel or in large quantities and pours it, in a body, upon the land of a private person, to his injury. Under this rule, while municipal authorities may pave and grade streets and are not ordinarily liable for an increase in surface water naturally falling on the land of a private owner where the work is properly done, they are not permitted to concentrate and gather such water into artificial drains or channels and throw it on the land of an individual owner in such manner and volume as to cause substantial injury to such land and without making adequate provision for its proper outflow, unless compensation is made. 18 E. McQuillin, Municipal Corporations § 53.144, at 538 (3d ed. rev.1963). Surface waters may not be artificially collected and discharged upon adjoining lands in quantities greater than or in a manner different from the natural flow thereof. At the same time, it is the rule that the flow of surface water along natural drains may be hastened or incidentally increased by artificial mea”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“[w]hen a question is raised as to the existence of a natural watercourse, that question must be determined by the trier of fact.”
2 later decisions quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.