Court Opinion

ID: 9780764
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-30 02:49:09.635496+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:34:12.945751
License: Public Domain

Justice PLEICONES.
I concur in part and dissent in part. I agree with the majority that the differential caps created by the Tort Claims Act (TCA) are constitutional. I disagree, however, with the majority’s conclusion that there was more than one occurrence here. I would therefore affirm the circuit court’s order.
In my opinion, the majority errs when it focuses on the number of acts of negligence rather than on the TCA’s definition of occurrence: “an unfolding sequence of events which proximately flow from a single act of negligence.” S.C.Code Ann. § 15-78-30(g) (2005). Under the TCA, an occurrence is not defined by the number of individual acts of negligence, nor does it require, as would the majority, a “causal connection” between these independent acts. Here, appellants’ theory was that as the result of the SCDOT’s negligent failure to have a replacement bulb policy a traffic light was not functioning properly, and when a concerned citizen notified SCDPS of the dangerous situation, that agency negligently failed to send a trooper to the scene to direct traffic. This unfolding sequence of events proximately led to the accident and appellants losses.
In my view, an occurrence is not defined by the number of agencies involved, or by the acts of negligence committed, nor by temporal proximity. Instead, the occurrence ends when the unfolding sequence of events is broken by an unnatural or intervening cause. Here, there was no such break, and thus *136appellants each suffered only one compensable loss as the result of a single occurrence.
I would affirm.