An unseaworthy stairway, a failing mooring line, and the casualty reports that were never filed.
A Gulf Coast tankerman was injured twice on the same fleet of towing vessels in under five months — first on a stairway whose anti-slip treads had been stripped away for weeks and never replaced, then on a mooring line whose worn chafe gear seized inside a chock at the worst possible moment. What ties the two incidents together is not bad luck. It is an employer whose own written safety system, and its own post-incident paperwork, supplied much of the proof.
A qualified tankerman, doing routine work
The crew member at the center of this study was no novice. He had joined the company as a deckhand, moved through its deckhand and tankerman trainee programs in the minimum time the company's own policy allowed, earned his Coast Guard tankerman license, and been promoted with a substantial pay raise. A company performance evaluation rated him satisfactory or above in every category. After the first incident, the captain who had worked with him specifically asked to have him on a second vessel. In short, the man's competence was never the issue, and the defense's own witnesses conceded as much.
He worked aboard twin-engine inland towing vessels — the kind of commercial workboats that push and pull barges along the rivers and ship channels of the Gulf Coast, and that fall squarely under federal towing-vessel regulation. His two injuries happened on two different boats in that fleet: the first at a river terminal in Louisiana in August 2018, the second on the inland waters near Houston, Texas in January 2019. Both were litigated under the Jones Act and the general maritime law's warranty of seaworthiness.
The stairway with its non-skid removed
During the hitch before the injury, the crew was tasked with annual painting of the vessel. That job required removing the non-skid treads from the forward stairs — the textured anti-slip surface that keeps a wet steel step from becoming a ramp. According to the only witness who could give a clear timeline, the treads were stripped off before he rotated off the boat, and he barricaded the top and bottom of the stairs when he did it.
He returned roughly two weeks later. The barricade was gone. The treads had not been put back. For a period of at least 22 days, the forward stairs sat bare — wet steel, no anti-slip surface, no barrier warning anyone away. On a cloudy, rainy morning he slipped at the top of those stairs while making routine rounds and fell to the deck below.
What makes this more than an ordinary slip-and-fall is that the employer had already written down, in advance, exactly why this was dangerous — and then again, after the fact, exactly what it should have done:
"When employees temporarily remove a safety item such as non-skid treads from steps for maintenance, the steps should be barricaded from being used."— From the employer's own post-incident "lessons learned" review
The company's safety manual separately required non-skid surfaces on "all exterior and interior stair steps," directed vessel masters to inspect for deficient non-skid and correct it "immediately before someone unexpectedly gets injured," and provided a policy on barricading recognized fall hazards. Every one of those internal rules pointed at the condition that hurt him — and none of them had been followed in the three weeks the stairs sat bare.
The mooring line that hung up
Cleared to return to work, he was eventually assigned to a second towing vessel in the fleet. Months after the fall, he was tying the boat off to empty barges after disconnecting from loaded ones — a routine maneuver that requires paying out extra mooring line so the face wire can reach the higher, lighter barge.
As he paid out the line, it would not run. The chafe gear — the protective sleeve that shields a line where it rubs through a steel chock — was old and worn, and it bunched into a knot that jammed in the chock and refused to feed through. Tie-up work cannot be done from a single tidy position; the video showed him kneeling, bending, and reaching below the barge deck to manage the fouled line. He felt his hip and back give way during the struggle. The relief captain, watching from the wheelhouse, called him back aboard.
The employer's safety system again cut against it. Its own procedure required the condition of face ropes to be checked weekly and documented on a wheelman's weekly inspection form. When discovery sought any purchase, maintenance, inspection, or replacement records for the chafe gear on that line, none were produced. The reasonable inference is the simplest one: the gear was worn out, nobody was inspecting it on the schedule the company itself mandated, and a seaman doing his job paid for it.
Three structural pillars, one warranty of seaworthiness
Read together, the two incidents are not a story about a clumsy worker. They are a story about a vessel and a fleet that were not reasonably fit for their intended use — the core of an unseaworthiness claim — and about an employer that failed to use reasonable care, the core of a Jones Act claim. The case rested on three independent pillars, any one of which could carry liability on its own.
An unseaworthy stairway
Anti-slip treads stripped and left off for 22-plus days, the warning barricade gone, on a workboat where wet steel stairs are an everyday hazard. Even a temporary unsafe condition breaches the owner's absolute duty to furnish a seaworthy vessel.
A safety system at war with itself
Three separate company procedures gave conflicting commands about stairs — one allowed a free hand, one demanded both hands on the rails at all times, a third asked only for "appropriate" handrail use. A rule that cannot be obeyed cannot be the seaman's fault.
A defective mooring line
Worn chafe gear that knotted and jammed in the chock, on a line the company's own policy said to inspect weekly — with no inspection or replacement records to be found. Defective gear is classic unseaworthiness.
Why the "three points of contact" defense collapses
Defendants in stair-fall cases reach reflexively for the "three points of contact" rule. But that rule — two feet and a hand, or two hands and a foot — is designed for vertical ladders and for mounting heavy equipment, not for walking down a flight of ship's stairs while carrying anything or moving at a normal pace. The employer's own manual only invoked the three-point stance in its ladder section, never for stairs, and the maritime and offshore industry (and the U.S. Navy) instead train the practical "trailing hand technique" for descending stairs. Holding a seaman to a standard no working vessel actually enforces is not a defense; it is an admission that the written rules were incoherent.
A regulatory duty, twice ignored
Both injuries sent the crew member off the vessel to a medical facility for x-rays and follow-up care, on restricted duty, eventually toward surgery. Under federal law, that is a reportable marine casualty: an injury requiring treatment beyond first aid that renders a crew member unfit for routine duties triggers a written report to the Coast Guard within five days, on Form CG-2692.
Two reportable casualties. Zero reports produced.
The employer's own safety manual assigned a named shoreside officer the duty to file the CG-2692 and notify the nearest Coast Guard office whenever a casualty of this kind occurred. When the plaintiff requested every report sent to or received from the Coast Guard or any agency about these incidents, the employer produced none.
A missing casualty report is rarely just a paperwork lapse. It is a regulatory violation that can support negligence per se, and it speaks volumes about whether an employer treated a serious crew injury as the casualty its own system said it was.
Where the defense pushed, and why it gave way
A serious maritime defense does not roll over, and this one did not. Two lines of attack were predictable, and both ran into the structural features of maritime injury law.
Comparative fault. The seaman helped remove the non-skid himself, chose to work the fouled line from awkward positions, and did not keep three points of contact on the stairs. Therefore his own conduct caused his injuries.
Under the Jones Act, the employer's negligence need only play any part, even the slightest, in the injury, and a seaman's duty to protect himself is treated as slight. Comparative fault reduces a recovery; it does not bar one. The duty to keep the vessel seaworthy — to put the treads back, to barricade the hazard, to inspect the line — was the owner's, not the deckhand's.
The McCorpen / maintenance-and-cure move. Separately, the employer pressed a partial-summary-judgment theory that the seaman had concealed prior medical history, aiming to cut off maintenance and cure under the McCorpen concealment defense.
McCorpen is anchored to a pre-hiring medical exam and concealment of facts the employer plainly wanted. Here the medical histories the employer relied on came from evaluations years after hire, and after the worker disclosed prior conditions the company cleared him "without restrictions" — undercutting both concealment and materiality. The motion was never ruled on, and it is included here only as context for the defense's posture.
An employer's own safety system is the sharpest tool in the room
The recurring lesson across both incidents is that the most persuasive evidence of unseaworthiness and negligence was generated by the defendant itself. The manual that required non-skid on every step. The barricade policy. The post-incident review that spelled out what should have been done. The weekly line-inspection rule with no inspection records behind it. The shoreside duty to file a CG-2692 that was never discharged.
When a maritime employer writes a detailed safety management system and then does not follow it, the gap between the written word and the actual condition of the vessel becomes the case. Plaintiff's counsel who learn to read an opponent's SMS as closely as the opponent's witnesses will often find that the strongest exhibits are already in the file — signed, dated, and produced by the other side.
For seamen and the lawyers who represent them
What is the difference between Jones Act negligence and unseaworthiness?
They are two separate claims a seaman can bring together. Jones Act negligence is fault-based: the seaman shows the employer failed to use reasonable care and that the failure played any part — even the slightest — in causing the injury. Unseaworthiness does not depend on fault at all. The vessel owner has an absolute, non-delegable duty to provide a vessel and equipment reasonably fit for their intended use, and even a temporary unsafe condition can breach it.
If a seaman helped remove a safety feature, doesn't that defeat the claim?
No. A seaman's own carelessness reduces a recovery under comparative fault, but it does not bar recovery, and a seaman's duty to look after his own safety is regarded as slight. More to the point, the duty to keep the vessel seaworthy — including restoring a removed safety feature and barricading a known hazard — belongs to the owner-operator, not to the individual crew member.
What is a CG-2692, and why does a missing one matter?
Form CG-2692 is the Coast Guard's marine-casualty report. Federal regulation requires a written report within five days of a reportable casualty, which includes an injury requiring medical treatment beyond first aid that leaves a crew member unfit for routine duties. When an employer's own safety manual assigns someone the duty to file it and no report ever appears, that gap can support negligence per se and tells a jury a great deal about how the incident was treated.
What is maintenance and cure, and how does McCorpen fit in?
Maintenance and cure is a near-automatic obligation in the general maritime law: an employer must pay a seaman's daily living expenses and medical care for an injury or illness that arises in the vessel's service, and doubts are resolved in the seaman's favor. The McCorpen defense lets an employer try to defeat it by proving the seaman intentionally concealed material medical facts during a pre-hiring exam. Because it is tied to the hiring process and to materiality, it is fragile where, as here, no medical history was sought at hire.
Doyle Dennis Avery LLP represents injured seamen, offshore workers, and maritime crews in Jones Act, unseaworthiness, and maintenance-and-cure litigation. This study reflects the firm's approach to building a liability case from an employer's own safety documentation.
Houston, Texas · Maritime & Offshore Injury
Anonymized and illustrative. The names of the parties, vessels, witnesses, experts, treating and examining physicians, and opposing counsel have been withheld, and identifying details generalized, to protect confidentiality. No outcome is represented. The dispositive motion described here was never ruled on, and this study does not state or imply any settlement, verdict, or 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
A Gulf Coast tankerman was injured twice in under five months on the same fleet of towing vessels, first on a stairway stripped of its anti-slip treads for weeks, then on a worn mooring line, with the required Coast Guard casualty reports never filed.
Legal lessons from this case
- Repeated, uncorrected hazards across a fleet can show an owner's pattern of unseaworthiness and neglect.
- Stripped anti-slip treads and a worn mooring line are conditions a reasonably fit vessel would not have.
- Failing to file a required marine-casualty report can itself become evidence in the case.
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