Norfleet v. Chemikalien Seetransport — A Defective Crane, a Personnel-Basket Transfer & a $4.5M Verdict

Moving crude between tankers, 68 miles offshore.

Charles Norfleet was a mooring master in lightering operations — the offshore practice of mooring two tankers together at sea and pumping crude oil from one to the other. On June 10, 2007, his crew was working the Sabine Lightering Zone in the Gulf of Mexico, roughly 68 nautical miles southeast of Galveston, to transfer 52,000 metric tons of crude from the tanker Olympic to the tanker Chemtrans Ray.

Norfleet rode out on a small utility support vessel, the Seahorse II. To do his job he first had to get from that small boat up onto the much larger tanker — a freeboard of roughly fifty feet — using the tanker’s deck crane and a personnel transfer basket.

Hanging by his hands, fifty feet up.

As the crane lifted Norfleet’s basket toward the tanker’s deck, the basket swung in too close to the hull. Its base ring caught the ship’s side, dragged downward, and tipped from horizontal toward vertical as it snagged a hose rail. Norfleet lost his footing and was left hanging by his hands from the basket netting, his feet dangling over the fifty-foot drop to the water and the work boat below.

He signaled the operator to boom the crane down to free the basket. Instead the operator lowered it, the basket caught the deck edge and flipped, and for a moment Norfleet was hanging upside down. He was finally swung over and dumped onto the deck. A deckhand who watched it described the basket swinging back and forth and seeing Norfleet “holding on for dear life.” He was seriously injured — his spine, his knees, and his body generally.

A leak, one direction, and a cadet at the controls.

The tanker had one crane. It leaked hydraulic fluid and could only turn one way. They sent him up on it anyway.

After the transfer, the cause was not a mystery. The Chemtrans Ray’s centerline crane — the vessel’s one and only crane — was defective: it leaked hydraulic fluid and could slew in just one direction. A crane that cannot freely rotate cannot swing a rising basket clear of the hull and out over the water, which is exactly the safety move the situation demanded. It was being run by a deck cadet, the only crewman Norfleet saw near it, with no dedicated signalman positioned to see down to the work boat.

What made it worse was what the companies knew. Two days before the transfer, the operators had been told the crane was defective and leaking. The word passed down the chain was that it had been repaired — and Norfleet, who was not a crane mechanic, was told it was fixed and took them at their word. It was not fixed. One shoreside manager who helped clear the operation acknowledged he had no maritime training and had never been to sea, yet no one passed Norfleet a warning about the crane he was about to ride.

Fifty hours of video — and not one thing to show for it.

Faced with the claim, the defense hired a private investigator to follow Norfleet in secret. Over about ten days and fifty to sixty hours of work, the investigator parked outside Norfleet’s home and trailed him to a church and to his child’s school, filming without telling anyone. After all of it, he had nothing: no sign of strenuous activity, and, in his own words, he “wasn’t seeing much.” Asked directly, he conceded he had seen no indication that Norfleet was anything but a good man who cared about his family. The surveillance cost the defense a few thousand dollars and produced no evidence at all that Norfleet was not hurt.

An unseaworthy vessel and an unsafe place to work.

The case ran on the core duties of maritime law. A vessel owner owes an absolute warranty that the ship and its equipment are reasonably fit for their intended use; a crane that is the vessel’s only means of personnel transfer, and that is broken, makes the vessel unseaworthy. And an employer owes its crew a non-delegable duty to provide a reasonably safe place to work and a safe means of getting on and off the vessel.

Several parties shared the responsibility: the company that owned and the company that operated the tanker with the broken crane, and the lightering employer that put Norfleet on the basket without confirming the crane was actually safe. The plaintiff’s marine-safety expert concluded that the vessel was unseaworthy, that the operation was conducted without enough competent crew, and that nothing Norfleet did caused or contributed to his own injuries.

A $4.5 million verdict.

A Harris County jury returned a verdict of approximately $4.5 million for Charles Norfleet. The case was tried by Michael P. Doyle, now of Doyle Dennis Avery LLP, with Patrick M. Dennis on the briefs.