Plaintiff was the chief engineer on the Defendant’s flagship vessel when on December 16, 2011 he was thrown in with a make-up rush job crew on another vessel to travel a day and a half out in the Gulf of Mexico in order to tend to another of the Defendant’s vessel that was sinking. The make-up vessel, the International Team, was to put a line on the sinking vessel so it would not drift. The radar on the International Team was malfunctioning because of bad battery connections. The batteries were in a confined space below the deck. The Captain told the Plaintiff to go check on the batteries and that the ordinary way the crews access the confined space was through an elevated air conditioning vent. The weather was rough and while exiting the elevated vent, Plaintiff fell when the vessel rocked onto his back and down some stairs lying below it thereby suffering back injury resulting in inability to engage in heavy work required of a mariner. As a defense, the Defendant contended that Captain instructed Plaintiff to go through an opening accessible by removing a wooden stairway. Plaintiff denied he was so instructed.
Plaintiff is 43 years with a 10th grade education. The evidence was that he could not return to shipboard employment. On November 19, 2014 the jury in the United States District for the Eastern District of Louisiana sitting in New Orleans awarded $1,531,000.00 in damages and found Plaintiff to be 55% negligent.
If you too have been injured while working on the Gulf of Mexico, or anywhere on the water, contact the maritime lawyers of O’Bryan Law today to let us help fight for the justice you deserve.
