Court Opinion

ID: 9559175
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 17:23:59.196529+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:09:54.038025
License: Public Domain

MAUGHAN, Justice
(dissenting) :
The ruling on appeal is a summary judgment, which says plaintiff cannot recover damages from defendant for causing and maintaining a condition which constitutes a public nuisance; and which injures plaintiff. We should reverse.
Section 73-14-2(a), U.C.A.1953, defines “pollution” as including an alteration of the physical, chemical or biological properties of any waters of the state, which renders such waters harmful, detrimental or injurious, to a commercial or industrial use. Any action causing “pollution” as defined in the foregoing section is deemed a public nuisance, Section 73-14 — 5(a), U.C. A.1953. Reading this statute in its entirety leaves no room for a resort to statutory construction, because there is no ambiguity in its terms.
The fact that plaintiff has merely a license, to divert the waters of the Great Salt Lake and extract the salt, with no ownership interest in the saline solution does not resolve the issue involved herein. Plaintiff seeks injunctive relief and damages on the ground that defendant maintains a public nuisance as declared by the legislature. We are required to draw the distinction, between an action for a public nuisance, and one for a private nuisance. The Restatement of Torts clarifies that distinction:
A private action may, however, arise out of a public nuisance, and such must be distinguished from private nuisance. An individual cannot maintain an action for a public nuisance as such. But when an individual suffers special damage from a public nuisance, he may maintain an action. This action for special damages arising out of the maintenance of a public nuisance is often confused with the action for private nuisance. The latter action has traditionally been restricted to invasions of interests in the use and enjoyment of land, and while a possessor of land is allowed to recover incidental damages for harms to his person or chattels in an action for private nuisance, the action is not available for the protection of those interests to a person who has no property rights or privileges in land. In cases where special damage has resulted from a public nuisance, invasions of interests of private persons other than interests in the use and enjoyment of land are actionable.1
In Lewis v. Pingree National Bank 2 this court stated the rule was well established, that private persons may not invoke the aid of the courts to abate public nuisances, unless they can show they suffer some special or peculiar injury, which is not common to the rest of the community. The court explained:
While private individuals, therefore, may not champion purely public rights, yet where an individual suffers some injury or damage through a public nuisance, which is different from that suffered by the community at large, he ordinarily may invoke the aid of the courts of justice, not only to redress the injury or damage suffered by him, but he may also ask to have the nuisance removed or abated. In order to permit an individual to resort to the courts, the extent of the injury or damage, ordinarily, is not material, so long as it is clearly *291shown that the plaintiff suffers some substantial injury or damage which is not suffered by the community at large. By substantial injury is meant that “it must be of a substantial character, not fleeting or evanescent” [Citations],

In Riggins v. District Court of Salt Lake City3 this court cited the general rule: An individual may bring an action concerning a public nuisance; only when he can show he has sustained damage, of a special character, distinct and different from the injury suffered by the public generally. This court expressed the view a private corporation may, by injunction, prevent the commission of any act which is without just cause or excuse, and which destroys its custom and profit.
The right to protect one’s financial interests is not confined to rights arising from contracts.
A plaintiff, having a special financial interest, has standing to maintain an action for abatement.
Illustrations of what “particular damage” is sufficient to support a private action for a public nuisance are of long standing.
Pecuniary loss to the plaintiff has been regarded as different in kind when the defendant’s obstruction has prevented the plaintiff from performing a particular contract, as for example to transport goods over the highway in question, or when it has put him to additional expense, or expensive delay, in performing it. It has also been considered sufficient where the plaintiff has an established business making a commercial use of the public right with which the defendant interferes, as where a river is blocked and plaintiff operates a steamboat line or rafts logs, or collects tolls for passage. There are several cases in which commercial fisheries making a localized use of public waters have been allowed to recover for pollution, where the ordinary citizen deprived of his occasional piscatorial Sunday pleasure could not do so 4
Plaintiff’s license to divert and extract salt from the state’s water is analogous to a commercial fisherman’s license, and the cases involving a fisherman’s private action for a public nuisance, pollution, are applicable to the instant action. In Columbia River Fishermen’s Protective Union v. City of St. Helens 5 the court described the plaintiffs, as gill net fishermen, who have a special interest, distinct from the public in fishing their drift, and such will be protected in a court of equity against destruction by acts of the defendants. The defendants were paper and pulp mills which discharged pollutants into the rivers. The defendant had successfully urged before the trial court plaintiffs could not maintain the suit, because they had suffered no special and peculiar injury differing in kind from that suffered by the public. The court responded :
There is a vital distinction between the rights of plaintiffs, who are accustomed to fishing in the river and have a license so to do, and the rights of other citizens of the state, who never fish in the river and do not intend to and are interested only in a general way in the benefit the state receives by the prosecution of a valuable industry, so that surely the plaintiffs have a special interest differing widely from the interest of the public in fishing in the portions of the river mentioned.6
*292The court recognized the ownership of the fish (as the salt in the instant action), before they were taken, to be in the State of Oregon. It explained the purpose of the action was not to obtain the fish, but to protect the right of fishermen to pursue their vocation of fishing. Thus, one, who is exercising his right to take fish from a common fishery, and is obstructed by a public nuisance, may abate the obstruction. The court held the privilege or right of plaintiffs, to fish, was distinguishable from the right of the public; and plaintiffs had sustained a special and material injury, by being deprived of the privilege of fishing, in the stream where they had a license to do so. Thus, they had standing to maintain their action.
In Hampton v. North Carolina Pulp Co.p7 plaintiff filed an action for damages to his fishery and business on the Roanoke River, caused by defendant discharging pollutants — a public nuisance. The court stated:
The law will not permit a substantial injury to the person or property of another by nuisance, though public and indictable, to go without individual redress, whether the right of action be referred to the existence of a special damage, or to an invasion of a more particular and more important personal right. The personal right involved here is the security of an established business. The fact that plaintiff had such established business antedating the nuisance, and that the injury had been done to this, takes him out of the rule and makes his damage special and peculiar. [Citations].8
Defendant urged plaintiff had no interest in the migration of the fish, which would give him a right of action for wrongful interference or diversion; because plaintiff had no property in the fish until they were captured. The court responded that plaintiff did not claim any property right in the fish, but did claim the right to have the migration continued uninterruptedly to his nets; without the wrongful interference of the defendant. It further observed that the convenient access, which plaintiff had from his property to the run of the fish, was an advantage of which he could not be lawfully deprived; by the alleged nuisance.
. It is true that he might obtain access to the fish by going to more distant points where the nuisance had not yet affected the fish, if there were such places, but “if a man’s time and money are worth anything,” he has received a substantial damage in being driven to this necessity.9
This statement is applicable to the matter at hand — for it is asserted plaintiff could go to the north end of the lake to divert the water.
In Carson v. Hercules Powder Company10 it was held that defendant, by polluting the water, had prevented the operation of plaintiff’s commercial fishing business; and, therefore, defendant became directly liable to plaintiff for any damage to his business and loss of profits.
In the instant action, plaintiff alleged defendant had created a condition, which the legislature had deemed a public nuisance. The trial court, evidently, granted defendant’s motion for summary judgment on the ground defendant had no property right in the salinity of the solution in the lake. However, a plaintiff’s action for damages for a public nuisance is not dependent on his establishing an interference with his use and enjoyment of his real property.11 Plaintiff is entitled to maintain *293its action for a public nuisance, if it can establish a special or peculiar injury or damage, which is not common to the rest of the community. Such an injury has been alleged, viz., plaintiff has an established business making commercial use of a public right, with which defendant has interfered. Plaintiff is entitled to a trial on the merits.
TUCKETT, J., concurs in the views expressed in the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Maughan.

. Restatement, Torts, Chap. 40, pp. 217-218.

. 47 Utah 35, 42, 151 P. 558, 561 (1915).

. 89 Utah 183, 220-221, 51 P.2d 645, 662 (1935).

. Prosser, Law of Torts (4th Ed.), § 88, pp. 590-591.

. 160 Or. 654, 87 P.2d 195 (1939).

. at p. 197 of 87 P.2d.

. 223 N.C. 535, 27 S.E.2d 538 (1943).

. at pp. 545-546 of 27 S.E.2d.

. p. 546 of 27 S.E.2d.

. 240 Ark. 887, 402 S.W.2d 640 (1966).

.Raymond v. Southern Pacific Company, 259 Or. 629, 488 P.2d 460 (1961) ; Culwell v. Abbott Construction Co., Inc., 211 Kan. 359, 506 P.2d 1191 (1973).