The appellant, William O’Malley (“O’Malley”), brought a complaint against the Appellee, Ranger Construction Industries, Inc. (“Ranger”), for negligence and failure to warn after O’Malley was involved in a single-vehicle accident on a portion of Interstate 95 that Ranger was contracted to resurface. The trial court granted Ranger’s motion for summary judgment, agreeing with Ranger that O’Malley’s theory of liability required the impermissible stacking of inferences. We find O’Malley’s case does not involve the stacking of inferences and we reverse the summary final judgment.
The trial court had the following evidence before it when ruling on the motion for summary judgment. The accident occurred at dusk on a three-lane portion of Interstate 95. At the time of the accident, it was raining and had been raining most of the day. O’Malley could not remember any details of the accident. The only witness to the accident, another driver, testified in a deposition that he was driving in the far right lane and saw O’Malley traveling in the far left passing lane at a rate of speed the witness believed to be unsafe for
Within minutes of the accident, a state trooper arrived at the scene of the accident. O’Malley was taken to the hospital, and the trooper was not able to speak to him. In a deposition, the trooper testified that there was standing water in the middle of the far left lane. He believed O’Malley was driving in excess of the speed limit. The trooper prepared a traffic crash report and accompanying diagram which both suggested that O’Malley lost control of the vehicle upon contact with the standing water.
Up until the point of the accident, Ranger had not performed any work on the middle and far left lanes but had, in fact, resurfaced the far right lane. Ranger’s expert opined that Ranger did not do anything that changed the flow of water from the outside (far right) shoulder to the inside (far left) shoulder. The expert could not say with certainty what caused O’Mal-ley to lose control of his vehicle.
According to O’Malley’s expert, based on a review of the contract specifications and daily work reports, Ranger failed to immediately remove the standing water as required by the contract, failed to provide adequate drainage, and was responsible for creating a hazardous condition.
The court found that a jury could not reach a verdict for O’Malley without im-permissibly stacking three inferences, 1) that there was a puddle or area of standing water in the far left lane at the time of the accident, 2) that O’Malley’s vehicle came into contact with it, and 3) that this contact caused the accident. The court found no direct evidence supported any of the inferences, and that each inference did not exclude other reasonable inferences. The court also found that Ranger’s theory of causation — that O’Malley’s speed and use of cruise control in the rain caused the accident — was as reasonable as O’Malley’s theory of causation.
“The applicable standard of review on orders granting summary judgment is de novo. Summary judgment is appropriate only where there are no genuine issues of material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. Additionally, all inferences must be made in favor of the non-moving party.” Cohen v. Arvin,
The rule relied on by Ranger and the trial court is stated in Nielsen v. City of Sarasota,
[I]n a civil case, a fact may be established by circumstantial evidence as effectively and as conclusively as it may be proved by direct positive evidence. The limitation on the rule simply is that if a party to a civil action depends upon the inferences to be drawn from circumstantial evidence as proof of one fact, it*1056 cannot construct a further inference upon the initial inference in order to establish a further fact unless it can be found that the original, basic inference was established to the exclusion of all other reasonable inferences.
Id. at 733. There is an important exception to this rule. When a predicate inference is the only reasonable inference that can be made from the evidence, it is no longer an inference but is deemed an established fact. Voelker v. Combined Ins. Co. of Am.,
There is no stacking of inferences here requiring application of these rules. Ranger has taken what is essentially one inference — that the standing water caused the accident — and attempted to stretch it out into multiple inferences. Where there is only one inference relating to causation, the non-movant to the motion for summary judgment does not have to establish that the sole inference is the only reasonable inference. Petruska v. Smartparks-Silver Springs, Inc.,
Reversed and remanded for further proceedings.