## Facts

- Landowners in the Seabrook and Clear Lake area of Harris County, Texas, brought a class action against Friendswood Development Company and Exxon Corporation.
- Plaintiffs alleged that defendants’ large-scale pumping of percolating groundwater from wells on defendants’ land caused regional land subsidence affecting plaintiffs’ neighboring tracts.
- Plaintiffs claimed resulting harm included flooding, erosion, and other surface property damage.
- Friendswood and Exxon sought summary judgment under Texas’s longstanding common-law rule governing percolating groundwater withdrawals.

## Issues

1. Whether, under then-existing Texas law, a landowner withdrawing percolating groundwater from wells on its own land is liable for neighboring land subsidence absent willful waste or malicious conduct.
2. Whether plaintiffs could avoid the groundwater rule of capture by pleading nuisance and negligence theories based on subsidence caused by groundwater pumping.
3. Whether any modification to Texas groundwater-withdrawal liability should apply retroactively or only prospectively.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of Texas reversed the court of civil appeals and affirmed the trial court’s summary judgment for Friendswood and Exxon.
- Under existing Texas law, defendants were not liable for subsidence resulting from their withdrawals of percolating groundwater from wells on their own land absent willful waste or malicious injury.
- The court announced a prospective change: for conduct occurring after the date of the opinion, a cause of action is available for subsidence proximately caused by groundwater withdrawals from wells drilled or operated negligently (and also for willfully wasteful or malicious withdrawals).
- The newly announced negligence-based limitation was not applied to impose liability for the withdrawals at issue in this case.

## Legal Principles

- Texas’s traditional rule of capture (absolute ownership) for percolating groundwater barred liability for harm to neighboring lands from groundwater withdrawals from one’s own land, absent willful waste or malicious injury.
- A long-established doctrine treated as a rule of property may be preserved for past conduct to protect settled reliance interests, even if the court announces a different rule for future conduct.
- Prospectively, liability may attach where groundwater withdrawals causing subsidence are the proximate result of negligent drilling or operation of wells, or are willfully wasteful or malicious.

## Conclusion

The court held that the rule of capture precluded liability for subsidence damages on the record presented, while prospectively recognizing negligence-based liability for future subsidence caused by improperly drilled or operated groundwater wells.


Friendswood Dev. Co. v. Smith-Sw. Indus., Inc., 576 S.W.2d 21 (Tex. 1978)