The Scindia Turnover Duty: What Vessel Owners Owe Longshore and Harbor Workers When Operations Begin

The Short Answer

If you were injured working on or around a vessel — as a longshoreman, tankerman, harbor worker, ship repairman, or any other contractor's employee whose work was on the vessel rather than as a member of its crew — your right to sue the vessel owner runs through Section 905(b) of the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act. The Act bars suits against your direct employer. It does not bar suits against the vessel owner. What the vessel owner owes you was settled by the Supreme Court in a 1981 case called Scindia Steam Navigation Co. v. De Los Santos, which set out three separate duties.

The first of those duties is the turnover duty. It governs the moment the vessel is handed over to the contractor for the work to begin. The vessel must be in a reasonably safe condition for that work. Hidden defects must be disclosed. Gear, equipment, tools, and the work space itself must be safe enough that an experienced contractor can do the job without unreasonable risk. If they aren't — and the contractor doesn't know — the vessel owner can be held liable for an injury that follows.

The other two Scindia duties — the active control duty and the duty to intervene — govern what happens after operations begin. This page covers the turnover duty.

The Turnover Duty at a Glance

When a vessel is turned over to a stevedore or other contractor for work, the vessel owner must:

1. Deliver the vessel in a reasonably safe condition for the work that's about to be performed.
2. Warn the contractor of any latent defects that are known to the vessel owner or would be known through reasonable inspection.
3. Ensure that any gear, equipment, tools, and work space turned over with the vessel are reasonably safe.

The duty is one of three set out in Scindia Steam Navigation Co. v. De Los Santos, 451 U.S. 156 (1981). It applies at the start of operations. The active control duty and duty to intervene cover what happens once the work begins.

What §905(b) Does, and Why Scindia Matters

The Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act provides federal workers' compensation benefits to longshoremen, harbor workers, ship repairers, shipbuilders, and certain other maritime workers who are not Jones Act seamen. Benefits are paid without regard to fault by the employer. In return, suits against the direct employer — the stevedore, terminal operator, or shipyard — are barred.

But the Act does not bar suits against everyone. Section 905(b) preserves the right to sue a third party — the vessel owner — for negligence, even when the worker is technically employed by the stevedore the vessel owner had contracted with. That preserved right is the source of nearly every personal-injury claim by a longshore or harbor worker against a vessel.

What does it mean for a vessel owner to be "negligent" toward a stevedore's employee? Before 1981, the answer was unsettled. Different circuits applied different rules. The Supreme Court resolved the question in Scindia. The opinion identified three distinct duties:

• The turnover duty — the duty to turn over a reasonably safe vessel.
• The active control duty — the duty to exercise reasonable care when the vessel owner remains actively involved in the cargo operation or retains control over an area.
• The duty to intervene — the duty to step in when a vessel owner knows of a hazard and knows that the stevedore, in obviously improvident judgment, intends to proceed despite it.

The turnover duty is the only one of the three that applies at the start of the work. It is also the one that produces the largest share of §905(b) litigation, because the moment of turnover is the moment when whatever defects are on the vessel become someone's problem.

What the Turnover Duty Actually Requires

The turnover duty has two components: a duty to turn over a reasonably safe vessel, and a duty to warn of latent defects.

A reasonably safe vessel

The vessel — including the gear, the equipment, the tools, and the workspace — must be in a condition that allows a reasonably skilled contractor to do the work safely. "Reasonably safe" is not absolute. The vessel does not have to be perfect, and not every hazard supports liability. But a vessel turned over with structural defects, unsafe walking surfaces, missing required safety equipment, contaminated decks, or known-and-uncorrected problems with the gear can support a turnover-duty claim.

A useful framing: courts look at the vessel from the perspective of a contractor about to begin work. Would a reasonably skilled contractor expect to encounter what was there? Would the contractor be able to do the job safely with what was provided? If the answer is no — and the vessel owner either knew or should have known of the problem — the turnover duty is implicated.

A warning about latent defects

The second component is the duty to warn. Even when a defect can't reasonably be remedied before turnover, the vessel owner has to alert the contractor to anything that wouldn't be obvious. A defect is "latent" when it's hidden from view, partially concealed, or otherwise the kind of thing a contractor wouldn't necessarily catch on inspection.

The warning has to be meaningful. A general statement that the vessel "might have issues" doesn't satisfy the duty if the vessel owner knows of a specific hazard. The warning has to identify the defect with enough specificity that the contractor can take it into account.

The "Open and Obvious" Defense — and Its Limits

The principal defense to a turnover-duty claim is that the defect was open and obvious. The reasoning is straightforward: if a hazard was apparent to an experienced contractor, the contractor was in a position to recognize it and adjust the work accordingly. The vessel owner's duty doesn't extend to warning about things the contractor would have seen on its own.

But the open-and-obvious defense has real limits, and defendants overuse it in practice.

The defense requires actual visibility, not theoretical visibility

A defect is open and obvious only if it was actually visible, on actual inspection, to the worker who encountered it. The fact that some hypothetical inspector could have spotted it does not make it open and obvious to the specific worker who got hurt. The defense often fails when the worker testifies — credibly — that the defect was not visible from where they were standing, or was obscured by other conditions, or was the kind of thing a worker would not have known to look for.

"Open and obvious" does not always extend to defects the worker had no opportunity to inspect

When a worker is injured on a vessel they were never asked to inspect, the open-and-obvious defense is harder to sustain. A tankerman moving between two barges, for example, may have responsibility for some parts of his work area but not others. A condition on a barge he had no occasion to inspect is not "open" to him in the relevant sense — he never had the chance.

Expectations matter

When a vessel has been mostly outfitted to one safety standard, workers reasonably expect the rest of the vessel to meet that standard. A walkway with non-slip coating on most surfaces creates a reasonable expectation that the remaining surfaces — hatches, for example — are similarly coated. If they aren't, the absence is not "open and obvious" in the relevant sense. A worker walking onto an uncoated surface he believed was coated has not voluntarily encountered an obvious hazard; he has been led into one.

The defense is the vessel owner's burden

Open and obvious is an affirmative defense. The vessel owner has to establish it on the facts. Summary judgment is rarely appropriate when reasonable people could differ about whether a defect was open and obvious — and reasonable people almost always can.

How Courts Have Actually Applied the Turnover Duty

Courts in the Fifth Circuit and elsewhere have applied the turnover duty across a wide range of fact patterns. A few recurring patterns are worth noting.

Unsafe walking surfaces. Hatches without non-slip coating, decks with worn or missing anti-skid treatment, walkways that have become slippery from chemical or biological residue — all are common turnover-duty cases. The defense will argue that the contractor's workers should have seen the condition or expected it. The plaintiff's response usually focuses on the specific worker's actual ability to see it, the consistency of the rest of the vessel, and the vessel owner's knowledge of the condition.

Defective or missing gear. When the vessel owner is responsible for providing equipment that turns out to be defective — a winch that doesn't work properly, a hoist that's been repaired with the wrong parts, a ladder that's missing safety features — turnover-duty claims often follow. The defense will sometimes argue that the contractor was responsible for inspecting the gear. Whether that argument holds depends on what was reasonable, what the contractor was told, and what the vessel owner knew.

Concealed hazards. Black ice on a deck, slippery patches in walking areas where coating has been worn away, surfaces contaminated with diesel or oil but visually similar to clean surfaces, structural weaknesses not visible from above — these are classic latent defects. The vessel owner has actual or constructive knowledge of them; the contractor doesn't; the turnover duty applies.

Surfaces wet from sea foam, spray, or mist. Marine working environments are intrinsically wet. A vessel owner's duty to turn over a reasonably safe vessel includes a duty to anticipate predictable conditions like spray, foam, and atmospheric moisture. A walking surface that is dangerously slippery when wet — and predictably will be wet during operations — does not satisfy the turnover duty just because it was dry at the moment of turnover.

Conditions created by the vessel owner's own staff. When a vessel owner's employees — not the contractor's — create or contribute to the hazard before turnover, the turnover duty is squarely implicated. Defendants try to argue that the contractor accepted the vessel "as is," but absent specific contractual language, that argument generally fails.

What This Means If You Were Hurt

If you've been injured working on a vessel — and you're not a Jones Act seaman — your case likely runs through §905(b) and the Scindia framework. A few practical points:

1. The turnover duty is fact-intensive. The condition of the vessel at the moment of turnover, what the vessel owner knew, what you knew, what was visible from where you were standing, what the contractor was told — all matter. Documents that record what the vessel looked like at turnover (incident reports, photographs, daily logs, inspection records) are often decisive.

2. You don't have to be a vessel-owner employee for §905(b) to apply. The whole point of the section is to preserve the negligence claim against the vessel owner even though you work for the stevedore or contractor. The argument that "you should sue your employer" is the wrong argument — your employer is barred from suit by the Act's exclusive remedy.

3. The vessel owner will try to push the responsibility back to the contractor. Expect to see the defense argue that the contractor (your employer) was responsible for inspection, for outfitting, for warning you, or for declining the job. The Scindia framework rejects this in important respects: the vessel owner has specific duties that cannot be delegated.

4. Open and obvious is a defense, not an automatic bar. A defendant invoking open-and-obvious has to actually establish it. If there is a genuine factual dispute about whether the condition was visible or whether you could have known about it, the question goes to a jury.

5. Custom and contract can expand the duty. When a vessel owner has historically retained responsibility for certain conditions (like non-skid coating throughout the vessel, or specific safety equipment), or when a contract assigns the duty to the vessel owner, the turnover duty incorporates that allocation. The defense's reliance on a general "the stevedore handles its own work area" rule fails when custom or contract has assigned the work to the vessel owner.

How the Turnover Duty Connects to the Other Two Scindia Duties

The three duties are not redundant. Each governs a different phase of the operation and a different type of hazard.

• The turnover duty covers conditions that existed when the vessel was handed over to the contractor. It is about the starting state of the vessel.
• The active control duty covers conditions in areas the vessel owner continued to control, or conditions arising from operations in which the vessel owner remained actively involved. It is about what the vessel owner did or failed to do during the work.
• The duty to intervene covers situations where a hazard developed during operations, the vessel owner became aware of it, and the contractor was nonetheless going to proceed in obviously improvident judgment. It is the narrowest of the three and applies only after the work has begun and the vessel owner knows of a specific hazard the contractor is going to confront.

In practice, a single case often implicates more than one duty. A defective walking surface that existed at turnover (turnover duty) may also be in an area the vessel owner has continued to control (active control duty), and the vessel owner may know that the workers will be walking on it (duty to intervene). Plaintiffs typically plead all three duties when the facts support more than one — losing on one duty doesn't matter if a parallel duty survives.

When the Case Has More Than a Turnover-Duty Fight

A clean turnover-duty claim is one of the more straightforward postures a §905(b) case can have. Many harder cases involve a turnover-duty issue layered on top of other complications: a foreign-flagged vessel that triggers Rule 4(k)(2) and Section 30105 analysis, an injury on an Outer Continental Shelf platform that brings OCSLA situs questions, a contested seaman-status finding that determines whether §905(b) or the Jones Act governs in the first place, or a forum-selection clause attempting to send the case offshore.

When a turnover-duty claim runs alongside one or more of these complications, the §905(b) briefing has to coordinate with the rest of the case. Choices made in the turnover-duty briefing — particularly on what the vessel owner knew and when — affect the available theories elsewhere.

See complex maritime cases for case history on §905(b) matters that involved multiple doctrines at once, foreign defendants, or jurisdictional fights.

Related Reading on This Site

• The active control duty — The second Scindia duty: when the vessel owner remains actively involved in operations or retains control over an area, what care it must exercise.
• The duty to intervene — The third Scindia duty: when the vessel owner must step in despite the contractor's apparent decision to proceed.
• § 905(b): the vessel-negligence overview — The pillar overview of §905(b) and how the three Scindia duties fit together.
• Sanchez: seaman vs. longshore worker — The contested question of whether a worker is a seaman (Jones Act) or a longshore worker (§905(b)).
• Longshore Act vs. the Jones Act — Which regime applies, and what each one is worth.