Burch v. WesternGeco — A Seismic Worker’s Head Injury & the Jones Act’s Featherweight Causation

Deploying air guns from a seismic survey vessel.

Darold Burch worked as a handling specialist aboard the M/V Western Pride, a seismic survey vessel owned and operated by WesternGeco Resources (a Schlumberger company) in the Gulf of Mexico. His job was to deploy and retrieve the towed seismic air guns the vessel used to map the geology below the seabed — heavy, awkward gear handled on a working deck and in the vessel’s slipway, the open stern channel through which equipment is run in and out of the water.

Standing up into an I-beam.

In December 2003, Burch was working in the vessel’s slipway when he stood up from a squatting position and struck his head on an overhead I-beam. He finished his shift, then reported neck pain to the vessel’s medic. Over the following days the symptoms grew — a severe headache different from the migraines he had lived with before, along with numbness and tingling that ran from his neck into his right shoulder and arm. He was eventually sent ashore and flown out for evaluation.

Imaging later confirmed pinched nerves in his neck. In 2006 he underwent cervical surgery to take the pressure off those nerves — an operation his treating neurologist considered a success, because it resolved the disabling headache the nerve compression had been driving.

A condition that was there before — but silent until the blow.

The Jones Act does not ask whether the accident was the cause. It asks whether the employer’s negligence played any part — even the slightest.

The defense built its case on the fact that Burch had nerve compression in his neck before the accident. But the treating neurologist explained the distinction that decided the matter: the nerves had been compressed for a long time, yet they were not irritated or symptomatic until the head strike set them off. In maritime law, that is enough. An employer takes its workers as it finds them, and an accident that lights up a previously silent, pre-existing condition is a cause of the resulting injury.

That principle carries extra weight under the Jones Act because the statute borrows the causation standard of the Federal Employers’ Liability Act — the so-called “featherweight” burden. The worker need only show that the employer’s negligence played any part, however small, in producing the injury. It is a standard, as the courts put it, that is highly favorable to the injured worker.

The overlapping remedies of a vessel worker.

Burch pursued the case on three maritime theories at once: Jones Act negligence against his employer, unseaworthiness under the general maritime law, and vessel negligence under § 905(b) of the Longshore Act. Pleading them together is common in offshore cases, because a single working deck can implicate more than one duty — the employer’s duty of care, the owner’s warranty that the vessel and its gear are reasonably fit, and a vessel’s separate negligence.

A verdict for the worker.

In Darold Burch v. WesternGeco Resources (Schlumberger), a Harris County jury found WesternGeco negligent and returned a $1.6 million verdict for Burch on his Jones Act claim. The matter was later resolved between the parties.

Jury verdict: $1,600,000 (Jones Act) · attorney’s fees $472,500 · case expenses $61,135.03
Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome.

The case was tried by Michael P. Doyle, now of Doyle Dennis Avery LLP.