§ 9-12-90.Judgments relating to common disaster

A single disaster — an event that produces multiple injured or deceased victims — can generate many separate lawsuits against the same defendant, whose assets may not stretch far enough to satisfy every judgment in full. Left to the ordinary date-of-judgment rule, whichever plaintiff won a judgment first would claim priority over everyone else, even though all the claims trace back to the same event. Subsection (a) rejects that outcome: liens from judgments in actions for damages growing out of a common disaster or occurrence rank equally, no matter the order in which the verdicts or judgments were rendered.

That equal-rank protection comes with a gatekeeper, though. It applies only to judgments obtained in actions filed within 12 months of the date the disaster or occurrence happened. A plaintiff who waits past that year loses the benefit of equal priority and falls back into the ordinary date-based ranking that governs judgments generally.

Subsection (b) confirms the section's reach: it applies to every action filed in Georgia's courts seeking damages for injuries sustained, or death resulting, from a common disaster or occurrence — not limited to any particular kind of catastrophe, but defined by the shared origin of the claims in one event.