The step that was stable four hundred times — until it wasn't.
An experienced project manager had walked the same shipyard gangway hundreds of times. Then, as he stepped off a newly built vessel during sea trials, an unsecured wooden block at the bottom of the gangway shifted under his weight and dropped him. Three different contractors had a hand in that access structure — and each pointed at the others. This is how a maritime negligence case is built when the hazard was a moving target and responsibility was a hot potato.
A vessel in sea trials, and a borrowed way ashore
A newly built offshore support vessel was finishing construction at a shipyard, tied up alongside and undergoing sea trials — the endurance and systems testing a buyer runs before accepting delivery. Because the vessel was not yet delivered, the shipyard owned it, controlled it, and was responsible for safe access to it. A third-party crew, supplied by a marine crewing contractor, manned the boat during the trials.
Getting aboard meant climbing a scaffold "stairtower" to reach a gangway that bridged across to the vessel — a structure the shipyard's own procedures called the "brow." A scaffold contractor had erected and was responsible for inspecting the stairtower; the shipyard provided and rigged the gangway itself. Because the boat rode up and down on tides, currents, and the wakes of passing vessels, the floating end of the gangway was designed to move: a roller on its underside rested on a plywood sheet atop the stairtower, and the gangway end was held in trim by slings and ratchet straps that needed constant adjustment.
At the join between the gangway and the stairtower sat the detail that would matter most: a loose wooden block, dropped in as a transition step. It was not fastened to anything. It had no handrail and no non-skid surface. And the whole project was running years late and well over budget, with the three companies increasingly at odds.
A booby trap, not a bump
The dangerous part of this case is also the subtle part. The injured man had crossed this gangway something like four hundred times. He testified that the loose block, though sometimes skewed, had always been stable underfoot — it had never once wobbled. So when he stepped onto it that day, nothing told him this time was different. It looked normal. Then it shifted, hung off the edge of the landing, and he went down, suffering a cervical-spine injury that required surgery.
Why was it fine four hundred times and lethal on the four-hundred-and-first? Because the hazard was intermittent by design. When the tide moved the boat and someone adjusted the straps, the gangway would drop out of trim and the loose block would creep out of position. The shipyard's dockmaster knew this. He had fixed it — re-trimmed the straps, repositioned the block — numerous times. He had even posted laminated signs warning people not to touch the ratchet straps. It kept coming back anyway: fine for a day or two, then the defect would reappear.
A condition that flips between safe and dangerous on a schedule no user can see is not an obvious hazard. It is a concealed one — a trap that resets itself.— The defect, in one line
About two weeks after the fall, the shipyard had the brow torn down and rebuilt so the gangway could ride freely without any loose transition block at all — confirming both that a safe configuration was feasible and that controlling it had always been within the shipyard's hands.
Three pillars holding up one negligence case
A shipowner owes a duty of reasonable care to those lawfully aboard who are not members of the crew. The case that the shipyard and its co-defendants breached that duty stood on three independent supports, each one answering a defense the motion for summary judgment would raise.
The owner created it — and knew
The shipyard's own dockmaster repeatedly repaired the recurring defect and reported it up to project management, where it went unfixed. A defendant does not need outside "notice" of a hazard its own people created and documented — that is direct actual knowledge.
"Open and obvious" is no shield
Under maritime law, an obvious danger reduces a recovery through comparative fault — it does not bar one. And the federal courts hold that obviousness is no defense at all to a negligent-maintenance or negligent-design claim, which is exactly what was pleaded here.
Everyone's job, no one's duty
The crewing contractor argued it owed no duty over a shipyard gangway. But its crew performed safety walk-arounds under recognized watch-keeping standards and had the right to flag hazards — an undertaking that creates a duty it then failed to honor.
The silo that hurt everyone but the defendants
The most telling theme in the depositions was that each company drew its responsibility narrowly enough to exclude the loose block. The scaffold contractor said it handled only the stairtower, not the gangway. The crewing contractor said the gangway was the shipyard's. The shipyard's dockmaster said he flagged it to project managers — who, on this record, did not permanently fix it. Incident reports were not shared between the companies. That finger-pointing is not a defense; under maritime law it is a map of overlapping duties, and a jury gets to decide how to allocate fault among parties who each had a chance to prevent the fall.
This is a maritime case, not a state-law case
The defense briefed its entire summary judgment motion under state premises-liability law. That was the first thing to contest — because the choice of law changes the outcome. State law might treat an open-and-obvious hazard as a complete bar to recovery; maritime law does not.
A gangway, plus a vessel on the water, equals maritime law.
Under the Admiralty Extension Act and the Supreme Court's two-part Grubart test, maritime law reaches an injury caused by a vessel on navigable water where the activity bears a substantial relationship to maritime commerce — even when the person is hurt on a structure reaching toward land.
Both prongs were met: courts have long held that traditional maritime law encompasses the gangway, the vessel was actively undergoing sea trials, and it was the vessel's movement on the water that knocked the gangway out of trim in the first place. Establishing admiralty jurisdiction dismantled the state-law premise the entire defense motion rested on.
Meeting the motion to strike the safety expert
Alongside summary judgment, the defense moved to strike the plaintiff's maritime safety expert under the standards governing expert admissibility — arguing he was unqualified because he was a marine engineer rather than a ship's master, that he lacked specific "gangway" expertise, and that his method was merely reviewing records a juror could read alone.
The response leaned on settled principles. The qualification bar is deliberately low; gaps go to weight and credibility for the jury, not to admissibility, and an expert need not have a credential that precisely matches the dispute. The expert here was a Merchant Marine Academy engineer with 35-plus years across shipyards, offshore drilling, classification-society survey, and ISM safety auditing, and he had in fact inspected gangways and embarkation ladders. His method — a structured root-cause review of incident reports, photographs, sworn testimony, and the applicable OSHA and company standards — is the ordinary and accepted way a safety expert reaches conclusions, and courts have repeatedly admitted exactly that approach. The gatekeeping role exists to keep out unreliable junk, not to substitute for cross-examination.
"He's an engineer, not a captain." The expert lacks a master's license and specific gangway credentials, so he is unqualified to opine on this access structure.
Demanding a perfectly matched credential is too high a bar. Decades of maritime safety, survey, and audit work — including actual gangway inspections — clears the threshold; the rest is fodder for cross-examination, which goes to weight, not admissibility.
Where the defense pushed on the merits
"The hazard was open and obvious." Anyone using the gangway could see the loose block, so there was no duty to warn or protect.
It was not obvious — the block had been stable across roughly four hundred crossings, an intermittent trap the owner kept re-fixing. And in maritime law, obviousness mitigates through comparative fault; it never bars a negligent-maintenance claim.
"We had no notice." The owner says it lacked actual or constructive knowledge of the dangerous condition.
The owner's own dockmaster repaired the recurring defect and reported it to management repeatedly. Where a defendant creates and documents the hazard, notice is established — and for a nautical condition like a gangway, the usual notice requirement may not even apply.
Pick the law first, then let the defendant's own records do the work
Two lessons run through this file. The first is that the choice of law is itself a battleground: a defense that quietly assumes state premises law can be defeated at the threshold by establishing maritime jurisdiction, which carries a friendlier comparative-fault rule and a narrower "open and obvious" doctrine. Reading the complaint's jurisdictional theory as seriously as its facts is what turns a hard motion into a winnable one.
The second is the now-familiar refrain across these studies: the strongest proof was the defendant's own. The dockmaster who fixed the hazard "numerous times," reported it up the line, and watched it reappear; the procedures that put responsibility squarely on the shipyard; the rebuilt brow two weeks later. When several contractors each carve their duties narrowly to exclude the dangerous spot, the gaps between them are not a shield — they are the case.
For workers and the lawyers who represent them
Why would a shipyard injury be a maritime case rather than a state-law case?
Under the Admiralty Extension Act and the Supreme Court's Grubart test, maritime law applies when an injury is caused by a vessel on navigable water and the activity is substantially related to maritime commerce. Courts treat the gangway — the means of boarding and leaving a vessel — as part of traditional maritime law, and a vessel in sea trials is engaged in maritime activity. That classification can decide which defenses are even available.
Is an "open and obvious" hazard a complete defense?
Not in maritime law. Comparative fault applies, so an obvious danger reduces a recovery rather than eliminating it. And the federal courts have held that obviousness does not bar a claim for negligent maintenance or negligent design — that doctrine is aimed at failure-to-warn theories, not at the duty to keep a walkway reasonably safe.
Does a property owner need "notice" of a hazard it created?
Usually not. When the defendant or its employees created the condition, notice is satisfied or beside the point. Here the owner's own dockmaster had repaired the recurring defect repeatedly and reported it to management — direct evidence of actual knowledge, not a guessing game about constructive notice.
Can a contractor be liable for a structure it says wasn't "its job"?
It can, if it undertook duties that touched the hazard. A crew that performs safety walk-arounds under recognized watch-keeping standards, and has the right to report dangers, has assumed a duty to do so reasonably. When multiple contractors each define their roles to exclude the dangerous spot, a jury can allocate fault among all of them.
Doyle Dennis Avery LLP represents injured maritime and offshore workers — seamen and shore-based personnel alike — in negligence, unseaworthiness, and access-and-safety cases against vessel owners, shipyards, and their contractors. This study reflects the firm's approach to choice-of-law strategy, multi-defendant liability, and defending expert testimony.
Houston, Texas · Maritime & Offshore Injury
Anonymized and illustrative. The names of the parties, the vessel, the shipyard and its contractors, the witnesses, the expert, the physicians, opposing counsel, and the court have been withheld, and identifying details generalized, to protect confidentiality. No outcome is represented. The filings described here were briefed before any ruling, and this study does not state or imply any decision on the motions, settlement, verdict, or other result. It is offered for educational purposes only, does not constitute legal advice, and does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case turns on its own facts and governing law; prior matters do not guarantee or predict the result of any future case.
Case summary
An experienced project manager had crossed the same shipyard gangway hundreds of times, but as he stepped off a newly built vessel during sea trials, an unsecured wooden block at the bottom of the gangway shifted under his weight. The case turned on who was responsible for a safe means of access across the brow.
Legal lessons from this case
- A safe means of getting on and off a vessel is a core duty, and a shifting, unsecured gangway component can breach it.
- Responsibility can be shared among the vessel, the shipyard, and a scaffold or access contractor.
- Long familiarity with a route does not relieve those responsible from keeping it reasonably safe.
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