Defendants—Sanford, Sanford Health, and the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society—allegedly owned or operated the Good Samaritan Kissimmee Village (Good Samaritan), a senior-living complex located near Kissimmee, Florida.
In 2017, Good Samaritan sustained then-unprecedented flood damage from Hurricane Irma that was purportedly exacerbated by a critical failure of the property’s waste-water treatment facility, resulting in contamination of the floodwater with biological toxins. Good Samaritan is accused of failing to implement any significant flood-mitigation measures in the immediate years after Irma.
Plaintiffs, unaware of this history, signed a lease agreement at Good Samaritan in 2021, intending to live out the remainder of their lives at the facility. Their plans changed in 2022 when Hurricane Ian struck the property, inundating Plaintiffs’ unit with toxic floodwater, and destroying most of their possessions. Plaintiffs alleged that Defendants’ failure to make necessary repairs after Irma and to provide adequate warnings to new tenants about the recent history of flooding at Good Samaritan allowed for the destruction of their property.
The parties retained experts to advance their respective theories of the case. Plaintiffs offered the testimony of Richard A. Halquist, an emergency-management specialist who opined that Good Samaritan faced an “extreme” risk of flooding before Hurricane Ian struck the property. Defendants offered the opinions of (1) forensic meteorologist Megan D. Walker, and (2) stormwater engineer David Hamstra. Walker analyzed a litany of official data sources relating to rainfall totals during Hurricanes Irma and Ian and opined that while Irma was a significant storm event, Ian was an exceptionally powerful and rare storm that produced unprecedented quantities of rainfall at Good Samaritan. Hamstra opined that adequate mitigation measures were not timely available to Good Samaritan. Both parties moved to exclude the opposing expert opinions under Daubert and Federal Rules of Evidence 702 and 403.
Flood Expert Witness
Richard A. Halquist is a Certified Floodplain Manager and possesses extensive experience modeling flood risk in Osceola County.
Meteorology Expert Witness
Megan D. Walker, CCM is AMS certified consulting meteorologist and educator with exceptional research and communication skills and diverse experience spanning the disciplines of atmospheric science, forensic and operational meteorology, natural hazard mitigation, and higher education.
Stormwater Expert Witness
David Hamstra, P.E., CFM specializes in the development of stormwater management master plans for public and private projects. Since 1987, he has completed and/or managed over 1,350 projects ranging in scale from designing stormwater management facilities for large-scale residential developments to developing stormwater master plans and Capital Improvement Programs for a great number of cities and counties.
Discussion by the Court
A. Richard A. Halquist
Halquist, relying on his experience as an Osceola County Emergency Operations Manager and his training as a Certified Floodplain Manager, undertook a “comprehensive evaluation of hydrological, topographic, and regulatory factors.” He opined that “an extreme degree of flood risk to the Good Samaritan campus” existed at the time Hurricane Ian struck the property.
Defendants argued that Halquist’s assessment lacked a reliable methodology, that he is unqualified to offer his opinions, and that he offered impermissible legal conclusions.
a. Qualifications
Defendants argued that Halquist is not qualified because his report stated that he evaluated the “hydrological, topographic, and regulatory factors” pertaining to Good Samaritan, but he lacked any degree or specialization in those areas.
Halquist is a Certified Floodplain Manager and possesses extensive experience modeling flood risk in Osceola County. The subject matter of his report—the relative risk of flooding at Good Samaritan—is sufficiently within his expertise. Defendants insist that Halquist has no technical scientific expertise in hydrology and associated fields and thus has no basis to opine as to the likelihood of flooding at Good Samaritan, but that objection does not call into question his qualification to assess flood risk. It is plain from his report that he is not offering a specialized opinion in those fields; instead, his report is firmly grounded in the data sets that he has been shown to be familiar with and his experience in emergency management. Accordingly, the Court rejected Defendants’ argument.
b. Sufficient Facts or Data
Defendants also argued that Halquist’s analysis is not sufficiently granular in that he failed to analyze flood risk caused by a rainfall event as enormous as Hurricane Ian, instead analyzing only a generalized flood risk. But the significance of the quantity of the rainfall brought on by Ian is disputed, and Halquist was not obligated to assume Defendants’ interpretation of the evidence.
Next, Defendants sought to exclude Halquist because his report erroneously cited the NAVD88 vertical datum when the levels from the relevant gauges were actually recorded in a different vertical control datum, NGVD29. Halquist acknowledged the mistake at his deposition but insisted that his analysis of the flooding effects at different gauge heights still holds under NGVD29.
Halquist’s mistake did not require his exclusion under Daubert. It is “error to conflate admissibility with credibility,” and “errors in an expert’s application of a reliable method generally implicate credibility rather than reliability.”
c. Reliable Principles and Methods
Defendants sought to exclude the assessment scoring table in Halquist’s report because it is “untested, unpublished, and not generally accepted” in his field.
Halquist created the scoring table using six of the fourteen factors analyzed in the 2020 Osceola County HIRA for county-wide risks. For his part, Halquist admitted that he has never prepared a flood-risk scoring table in this manner before and he is not aware of any other source that has applied his chosen methodology.
Plaintiffs have not shown that Halquist’s selection of six of the fourteen factors from a holistic assessment designed to assess general risk on a county-wide basis and application of those factors to a specific risk to a specific property is a generally accepted method of appraising risk. This is an instance where an otherwise valid scientific methodology has been misappropriated and contrived to reach a particular result in the guise of an expert opinion.
The factors and scores Halquist selected amount to “personal intuition offered up as professional expertise—untestable, unverifiable, and precisely the sort of expert say-so that Daubert excludes.” Accordingly, the Court excluded the scoring table.
Because Plaintiffs admitted that certain pages of Halquist’s report contain impermissible legal conclusions as to the foreseeability of the flood, those opinions must also be excluded.
d. Unfair Prejudice
Defendants also claimed that allowing Halquist to testify that Good Samaritan faced “extreme” flood risk would be unfairly prejudicial because his opinion improperly conflates an “extreme” risk of even a minor flood with the risk of the unprecedented flooding that occurred in this case.
The Court interpreted this as an argument pursuant to Rule 403 and disagreed.
Defendants also sought to exclude Halquist’s “backwater” and “rebuttal” opinions that were offered for the first time at Halquist’s deposition. In response, Plaintiffs insisted that Halquist was not offering these opinions and was merely responding to questioning. Because Plaintiffs stated that Halquist will not be offering an opinion on these matters, they will be excluded by the Court.
B. Megan D. Walker
Megan Walker was retained to investigate rainfall patterns during Hurricanes Irma and Ian. In her report, she explained that although both storms caused “historically heavy rainfall” in the Orlando area, “Hurricane Ian was a significantly more extreme and rare rainfall event than Hurricane Irma.”
a. Helpfulness to the Trier of Fact
Plaintiffs claimed that Walker’s testimony would not be helpful to the trier of fact because: (1) her opinions are not relevant to the issue of foreseeability of flooding; (2) she ignored other factors relevant to the foreseeability of flooding; and (3) rainfall totals are a matter of public record, rendering her testimony redundant.
Defendants contended that the rainfall totals have a high degree of explanatory power over the ultimate issues in this case. Thus, expert testimony regarding the “climatological context” of rainfall data at Good Samaritan is potentially helpful to the trier of fact in evaluating Defendants’ theory of the case. Defendants are free to argue the inference that the high rainfall totals and rare rainfall recurrence rates described in Walker’s report render the at-issue flooding unforeseeable. That Plaintiffs interpret the significance of the evidence differently is not a valid basis for exclusion under Daubert.
Finally, Plaintiffs’ objection that the Court could simply judicially notice publicly recorded rainfall calculations is unpersuasive. Walker’s report stated that the publicly available rainfall data is inaccurate, and she provided a detailed methodology in which she purported to combine complementary data sets and implements a mean-field bias-correction protocol to improve accuracy. The calculation of rainfall totals and rainfall recurrence intervals using several discrete data sets for each storm is not an exercise in common sense or simple logic that jurors should be expected to perform on their own.
b. Sufficient Facts or Data
Next, Plaintiffs contended that Walker’s report is not based on sufficient facts or data.
Walker relied on data collected by NOAA, the NWS, and the NHC. Her selection of databases is grounded in academic literature and appears to be the kind of data that an expert meteorologist would reasonably rely on. In her report, Walker adequately explained the data sets she used and notified Plaintiffs of all materials that she considered in formulating her opinions.
Plaintiffs argued that Walker improperly relied on “limited rain gauge data, selective radar stations, a case-specific mean-field bias I] correction that she created for this matter, and unexplained presentation of extraordinary rarity estimates.” Plaintiffs pointed out that no rain-gauge stations were located in close proximity to Good Samaritan at the time of Hurricane Irma, and they characterized the available rain-gauge stations during Ian as only “slightly” better.
While Plaintiffs’ critiques might have a certain degree of statistical or epistemic merit, they did not provide a basis for exclusion under Daubert. Walker reviewed meteorological data from multiple sources, compared Good Samaritan’s location to the source of the data, generated a bias-correction procedure based on the data she reviewed, and formed an opinion about the extent of the rainfall that occurred at Good Samaritan. Other courts have not found fault with the sufficiency of data in similar circumstances and have often approved of meteorology experts who survey and synthesize discrete weather databases.
c. Unfair Prejudice
Plaintiffs argued the jury will be unfairly misled by Walker’s testimony because under the guise of rainfall analysis, her report implied that the at-issue flood was unforeseeable. But the Court is not in a position to determine whether the historic nature of the rainfall from Ian was necessary to cause Plaintiffs’ damages or if Plaintiffs would have been similarly damaged during a more typical storm. Accordingly, expert testimony is permissible on the subject of rainfall analysis.
C. David Hamstra
Hamstra assessed the circumstances surrounding the at-issue flood, detailed Good Samaritan’s attempts at obtaining funding to implement mitigation measures following Irma. Having done so, he opined that Good Samaritan, through no fault of its own, could not have secured mitigation that would have prevented the damage in this case.
a. Reliable Principles and Methods
Plaintiffs asserted that Hamstra’s lengthy narration of Good Samaritan’s unsuccessful efforts to procure mitigation funding is simply “a justification of Defendants’ policy choices rather than an independent expert assessment grounded in engineering methodology.”
Through his education, training, and experience, Hamstra has obtained expertise in the specialized process of mitigation grant funding. Moreover, his report details how he is aware through his role with Pegasus of the different mitigation options that were available to Good Samaritan, the mitigation plans that Good Samaritan considered, and the grant funding sources that Good Samaritan sought out. His experience provided an adequate basis for his opinions, and that experience appears to be reliably applied to the facts of this case.
Plaintiffs also sought to exclude Hamstra’s opinion that Hurricane Ian was a 200- to 500-year storm event on the grounds that his opinion is unsupported by reliable engineering principles.
Here, Hamstra properly relied on Walker’s report and supplied his own analysis, including his own study of the property’s topography, rain-gauge flood elevation readings, and historical rainfall data—all of which are within his competency to evaluate as a stormwater engineer.
b. Helpfulness to the Trier of Fact
Plaintiffs also argued that Hamstra’s report would not be helpful to the trier of fact because it merely functions as a self-interested “advocacy piece” for the work that he performed for Good Samaritan in his capacity with Pegasus before this case began.
However, the existence of bias in an expert witness’ testimony is usually a credibility issue for the jury.
c. Impermissible Legal Conclusions
Plaintiffs contended that Hamstra offers impermissible legal conclusions when he opined that “the allegations made by Plaintiffs and their legal counsel are unfounded and without merit”; that Good Samaritan “acted responsibly”; “took reasonable steps”; “appropriately pursued mitigation”; and “fulfilled its responsibilities.”
In opining about the nature of the mitigation process and the possible grant sources Good Samaritan explored, Hamstra’s report embraced the ultimate issue of Good Samaritan’s alleged negligence in this case while remaining within the bounds of permissible expert testimony. However, the Court agreed with Plaintiffs that Hamstra’s report crosses the line when he asserts that Plaintiffs’ claims are meritless and that Good Samaritan acted reasonably and responsibly under the circumstances. Although, as Defendants claim, one can use the terms “reasonable” and “responsible” in a colloquial sense, the terms as used in Hamstra’s report appear tinged with legal meaning and must be excluded. Whether Good Samaritan “acted responsibly,” “took reasonable steps,” “appropriately pursued mitigation,” or “fulfilled its responsibilities” are legal questions for the trier of fact.
Held
The Court granted in part and denied in part Defendants’ Daubert motion and Plaintiffs’ Daubert motion. The Court excluded the following expert testimony:
- Halquist’s flood risk scoring chart;
- Halquist’s legal conclusions as to the foreseeability of the flood;
- Halquist’s “backwater” and “rebuttal” opinions;
- Hamstra’s legal conclusions that Plaintiffs claims are “unfounded and without merit”; that Good Samaritan “acted responsibly”; “took reasonable steps”; “appropriately pursued mitigation”; and that it “fulfilled its responsibilities.”
In all other respects, the Court denied the motions.
Key Takeaway
Although expert reports often require rigorous scientific or statistical analysis, Daubert also allows for admitting experts whose methods are less formal, such as when an expert testifies primarily based on experience.
The proponent of the testimony in such a case must explain how that experience led to the conclusion he reached, why that experience was a sufficient basis for the opinion, and just how that experience was reliably applied to the facts of the case.
Case Details:
| Case Caption: | Matthews V. Sanford |
| Docket Number: | 6:25cv143 |
| Court Name: | United States District Court, Florida Middle |
| Order Date: | May 07, 2026 |
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