Hamilton v. Great Lakes Dredge & Dock — A Slippery Painted Step & a $1.22M Jones Act Verdict

A leverman on a cutter suction dredge.

Roger Hamilton worked as a leverman aboard the Pontchartrain, a cutter suction dredge operated by Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Company. The dredge was working in Lake McKellar on the Mississippi River near Memphis, Tennessee, finishing a maintenance-dredging contract for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

A dredge is a vessel in the eyes of maritime law — the U.S. Supreme Court said as much in Stewart v. Dutra — so its crew are Jones Act seamen, with the right to hold the employer to a duty of reasonable care for their safety.

Thirteen steps of grating — and one that wasn’t.

On a drizzling November morning, after the day’s 7 a.m. work meeting, Hamilton started down the port bow stairway from the quarters deck to the main deck — a steep run of fourteen steps, roughly ten feet of drop. He slipped on the bottom step and fell to the deck. A deckhand saw it happen.

What set the bottom step apart was its surface. The top thirteen steps were open expanded-metal grating, which sheds water and grips a boot. The bottom step alone was raised diamond-plate steel — and it had just been freshly painted, part of a top-to-bottom repaint of the dredge that included the outside stairways. Wet enamel paint dries to a slick surface, and in the rain that one step had nothing to grip.

What custom and practice required.

A raised diamond pattern stops being a non-skid surface once decades of paint fill it in.

The case was built on marine custom and practice, established through a marine-safety expert. A diamond-plate step is supposed to resist slips through its raised pattern — but the Pontchartrain was built in 1962, and after decades of repainting, paint had filled the spaces between the raised diamonds and flattened their grip. The accepted answer in the industry is straightforward: lay an abrasive non-skid strip across the front edge of the tread, or mix a non-skid grit such as sand into the paint, so the step holds even in drizzle. None of that had been done to the step that gave way.

The standard of care, in other words, was not exotic. A reasonably prudent operator keeps its stairways safe in the weather its crews actually work in, and an employer’s duty to provide a safe place to work is non-delegable. The record also raised a separate concern about safety culture: it appeared the company had not filed the marine-casualty report that federal regulations require when a crew member is hurt badly enough to need real medical care and is left unable to do the job.

You don’t need both theories to win.

The case was submitted to the jury on two independent theories: Jones Act negligence against the employer and unseaworthiness of the vessel. The jury found Great Lakes negligent under the Jones Act and found that its negligence caused the incident — while declining to find the dredge itself unseaworthy. That split is worth understanding: the two theories are separate, and a worker can win on employer negligence alone.

Just as important, the jury found Hamilton zero percent at fault. The hazard was the company’s — a step it had painted slick and left without a non-skid surface — not the worker’s for using the stairway he was expected to use.

$1.22 million, no fault on the worker.

The Harris County jury awarded Roger Hamilton $1,222,491.33 in damages — including past and future medical care, past and future loss of earning capacity (with more than $400,000 for future earning capacity alone), and amounts for pain, mental anguish, and physical impairment. After a stipulated credit for an advance the company had paid, the court entered judgment on the verdict.

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