Bruce v. Wallis

The trial court abused its discretion in finding that the corrective steps taken by the defendant did not adequately abate an alleged nuisance.

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Delana Bruce appeals from an order abating a nuisance on her property, challenging the propriety of the relief granted. Finding that the trial court manifestly abused its discretion, we reverse.

1. Ralph Wallis owns property with a pond located on it for raising fish. Wallis’s property is across a county road from Bruce’s farm, where she has trained, bred, and boarded horses for 25 years. Wallis filed a complaint against Bruce to abate a nuisance contending that manure on her property created noxious and offensive odors and that the manure drained into Wallis’s pond and killed his fish. Bruce, who was pro se at the time, was not present at the hearing when Wallis introduced photographs and testimony that overgrazing of the land by Bruce’s horses had increased the flow of water onto Wallis’s land, washing horse manure into the pond. After the court found both the manure and the horses constituted a nuisance, Bruce was contacted by telephone and arrived to testify that the manure pile had been removed and that it was the three-month drought during the summer of 2000 that had stripped her land of grass and killed Wallis’s fish. The trial court granted a temporary injunction requiring Bruce to reduce the number of animals weighing in excess of fifty pounds on her property to three animals within 30 days. Bruce then obtained counsel and filed an emergency motion requesting that the court modify its order, attaching affidavits setting forth the harm to her horse business and the potential danger to her horses that would be caused by the dispersal order. The motion was denied in an order in which the trial court appointed a National Resource Conservation Service employee to study the situation1 and allowed the parties to submit affidavit evidence.

Bruce v. Wallis

The trial court abused its discretion in finding that the corrective steps taken by the defendant did not adequately abate an alleged nuisance.

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