In this personal injury action, Linda Biddy contends she was injured by an unknown substance emanating from a City of Cartersville truck. She appeals from the grant of summary judgment in favor of defendant City of Cartersville, asserting that the trial court erred in concluding that she failed to demonstrate that any act or omission of the City caused her alleged injuries or that those injuries were caused by the unknown substance. We need not reach the question of medical causation of Biddy’s injuries, because she has failed to establish that the truck was owned or operated by the City and thus that the City’s act or omission caused the incident. For this reason, we affirm the trial court’s grant of summary judgment. The relevant facts are not in dispute. On December 3, 2001, Linda Biddy was driving her mother to a doctor’s appointment when she pulled up behind a truck stopped at a traffic light in the City of Cartersville. The truck was a large truck with a “kind of a tank that looked like a . . . water tank . . . . And coming from the top of the back of the truck . . . was this large hose about twice the size of a dryer hose and it was black.” The light turned green and the truck did not move; Biddy thought the truck was stalled and put her head out the window to look. As she did so, she was gassed or sprayed by some unknown substance “like kind of a gray mist” that came out of the hose. Biddy was “horrified because I had heard a lot about, you know, stuff, things that’s overseas was coming over spraying everything.” Her eyes began to burn and her throat started closing up, and she started choking and coughing. When the mist cleared, she saw the truck going down the road “still throwing out that stuff.” She attempted to follow the truck, but “he just kind of disappeared. He went off in traffic and we couldn’t keep up with him.” Biddy and her mother never saw the truck again.
In her deposition, Biddy testified that she believed the truck belonged to the City because it had “City of Cartersville” in large red letters on the door. When she reported the incident to the police, they referred her to an assistant director in the City’s maintenance department to try to locate the truck. Biddy testified that the director walked her around the truck yard and let her look at all the trucks, except for some that he said had not come in for the afternoon. She was unable to find the truck involved in the incident. She thought that a street sweeper she saw was “similar but not identical” to the truck involved, but she did not remember the “sweeper things” being on the truck. She also visited a county facility because the assistant director thought some City trucks might be there, but Biddy testified that the employees there “had the doors locked and I didn’t see anything.”
