The Baltimore Bridge Collapse: Admiralty Law, Liability, & Litigation

Episode Notes

Transcript

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

If the captain is negligent, that’s probably not going to be enough. We’re going to have to see that somebody in the vessel owners corporate hierarchy knew what was going on, should have known what was going on, knew there were problems with the ship, so probably the captain or a helmsman not good enough. It’s going to have to be at that corporate level to break that gap.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to the award-winning podcast, Lawyer 2 Lawyer with J. Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You are listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams:

Welcome to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams, coming to you from Southern California. I write a blog named May It Please the Court. I have two books out titled How To Get Sued In the Sled. My blog may please. The Court is up and running and in the new year, so please check it out. It may please the court.com Also have a new book coming out this month titled, how Would You Decide 10 Famous Trials That Changed History Be On the Lookout? Well, in the early morning hours of March 26th, 2024, this year, Baltimore’s Francis Scott Keybridge collapsed after Singapore base cargo ship named the Dolly Lost Power and Hit the Bridge’s abutment. Well, according to officials, eight people were on that bridge that morning when it fell. Two have been rescued, two bodies have been recovered. Four more are presumed dead and not yet recovered.

Crew members on the Dolly are all safe, so who’s liable for this terrible tragedy and what type of Litigation will we see? Well, today on Lawyer 2 Lawyer, we’ll spotlight the Baltimore Bridge collapse. We’ll discuss a number of things including Admiralty law, liability, Litigation impact, how to prevent future disasters involving vessels and some criminal issues, and to help us better understand today’s topic, we’re joined today by Thomas C. Galligan Jr. A law professor at Louisiana State University’s Paul m Abert Law Center. Tom holds the Dodson and Hooks endowed chair in maritime law and teaches and writes about torts and admiralty. From January 1st, 2020 to July 5th, 2021, he served as LSU President now holding the rank of President Emeritus. Welcome to the show, Tom.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Thanks. It’s great to be with you.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Tom, tell us a little bit about your role at LSU and how your basketball team managed to beat Iowa and then you became interested in Admiralty Law. I’m kind of joking about the Iowa

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

I gotcha. Well, I’m a law professor here at LSU and I absolutely love teaching and I love my students and our basketball team lost to Iowa this year. They beat ’em last year, so it’s even up. We’ll see what happens next year. Admiralty Craig, I was teaching torts in South Louisiana back in the late eighties and early nineties, and I was getting asked by lawyers when I gave talks about torts. What’s the rule in admiralty? What’s the rule in admiralty? I didn’t know. I went to one of my mentors and I said, what should I do? He said his name was Frank Maray. He’s Cajun. He said, you got to teach Admiralty, you got to teach admiralty. He was an admiralty teacher, and so he turned it over to me and I started teaching admiralty and fell in love with the subject and have been teaching it more or less ever since.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, there’s a lot of differences between admiralty and ta, but we’re going to get into it. First, let’s get a brief overview of what happened here with the bridge.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Sure thing. The Dolly, which is a Singapore based ship, was leaving the harbor in Baltimore off for a 27 day cruise to Sri Lanka. It left port with a couple of tugs. The tugs were with it until I think about 1:09 AM The tugs spun off and the dolly under its own power was heading out and somewhere about 1 24, 1 25, it looks like the power went out, and if you’ve watched a video of it, you see that there’s then a puff of smoke, which is probably the auxiliary power system coming on. But the power system was not adequate to bring back the steering of the ship and the ship allied with the Francis Scott Key Bridge and the bridge collapsed on the vessel, and it is still there today. Tragically, as we know, a group of workers who were on the bridge trying to escape and get off the bridge didn’t make it. I think two have been rescued, the others have been lost, and now we’re dealing with the carnage.

J. Craig Williams:

The questions come about why the tugs didn’t escort the vessel all the way out through the bridge, and I would say at least my experience in the Coast Guard was that once a tugboat takes a vessel to an unrestricted channel, it’s free to go. Is that right?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

I think that’s exactly right. And also the vessel had pilots aboard. And what’s a pilot? A compulsory pilot is most major ports in the world will require foreign ships when they’re coming in and out of port to have a pilot on board. And a pilot is a locally licensed official who is an expert in knowing that port. And so the pilot then guides the ship out of port. So the pilot was actually at the or at the helm when the power failed.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. Now, can we blame the pilot for this?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

No, I don’t think so. We’re going to an investigation by the National Transportation and Safety Board, the NTSB, we’ll see what happened, but from all the pilot has told us from all that we’ve heard, it was a power failure, and that is generally not the responsibility of the pilot. Now, Craig, as a lawyer, we won’t know what really happened until the investigation is complete, but that’s just sort of a tentative conclusion that no, it wasn’t the pilot’s fault

J. Craig Williams:

And we probably can’t blame the captain for it, but the pilot is the equivalent of the captain

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

That the pilot is basically the equivalent of the captain. We could get into some details about Admiralty Law and Pilots. The pilot is basically in charge up there, but the captain is never not in charge. So the captain at any point can say to the pilot, no, no, I’m taking over. I’m stepping back in. But you’re right. Your basic question is what about potential fault to the captain? And if the power really went out, then the question is why did the power go out? And we don’t know what responsibility the captain may have had for any pre-departure surveys or inspections or anything like that. But if the pilot, neither Noner should have known about some problem with the power source, then again, we’ll get the investigation. But it would not look like the pilot was to blame,

J. Craig Williams:

Right? Of course not. No. And we would think too, that at least from what I’ve read, that I’ve heard that the ship lost power at dock several times before it left.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

And we have read that. And if that’s the case, then maybe who knows who’s responsible? Should the ship have not left? Should the ship have made sure that its power sources were going to function, that its alternative power source was going to function and was going to kick in quickly enough and be adequate to steer the ship?

J. Craig Williams:

I wonder whether we’ll see some future regulations from the Coast Guard or some practice changes in various ports, whether ships are now required to have tugboat assistance through Bridges.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

We may see some discussion of requirements like that. It’s all a cost benefit analysis and requiring tugs to take ships through the bridges is going to raise cost. If obviously the benefit we get from safety is greater than the cost, then I sound like Richard Posner, but then it certainly would be worth it.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, given what this is going to cost, as the estimates are in the billions, it seems like we wouldn’t begin to touch that.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

I think that’s probably right.

J. Craig Williams:

And we just had a recent accident where theBar Narrows bridge in New York was almost hit,

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

And we’ve seen it was a New York Times piece a couple of days ago that I saw about number of bridges that we have in the United States that are either not protected or are arguably not adequately protected.

J. Craig Williams:

A lot of people have asked why it is that bridges aren’t designed to withstand impacts from ships. Having been in the Coast Guard, my experiences that they’re designed to withstand collisions with barges, loose barges, but not ships, because ships are generally considered to be capable of going through and not hitting it.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

I think that’s exactly right. And I also think we realized that a lot of these bridges were designed a long time ago. The ships are bigger, they’re more powerful, and they’re carrying cargoes that we never would’ve dreamed that ships would be able to carry a hundred years ago.

J. Craig Williams:

It’s like a hundred million tons in this thing, wasn’t it? Something like that.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Yes. Yeah, it’s a phenomenal number. The ship is a thousand feet long. So we’re talking a big vessel,

J. Craig Williams:

And let’s jump into that because we’re talking about a thousand foot long ship that weighs a hundred million tons and the laws that are being applied to it were designed for wooden ships that are probably not more than several hundred feet long.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

You’re exactly right. And a lot of, at least some of the significant laws that we are talking about are close to 175 years old.

J. Craig Williams:

How can we possibly apply these laws? I mean, that’s what the Admiral Courts are stuck with. This is the law, but tell us how they apply here.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Well, the most important, or at least the law that is going to get the most press in this is an 1851 statute called the Limitation of Liability Act. And the limitation of liability Act passed before the Civil War was designed to make American shipping more competitive with other nations because other nations have these limited liability statutes. Now, what does it mean? It means that if the vessel owner is not personally at fault, they call it privity or knowledge, the vessel owner can limit its liability to the post-disaster value of the vessel, and it can force everyone who may have a claim to come into one proceeding, call it a concurs proceeding. One admiralty concurs this proceeding and prosecute their claims in that proceeding. And it’s that statute, that 1851 statute that the owners have already invoked and begun a limitation of liability proceeding in federal court.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Tom, we’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back and welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m joined by LSU Law Professor and LSU President Emeritus, Tom Galligan. We’ve been talking about that crazy. I’ll say ancient law at this point that limits the liability, but how does that affect the poor people that have claims? I mean, there’s going to be at least six claims of people that have died, their families. You read about these gentlemen that have come from foreign countries. They’ve got children that they rely on for support. What do they do now?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

What they’re going to have to do is they are going to have to make claims in that limitation of liability action, so they will make claims against the vessel and against the fund.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, let’s get into the numbers here. I’ve read through the complaint that was filed in Admiralty. They claim the vessel’s worth 43 million. It’s got about a million something in cargo. It’s got 19 million in salvage value. So they’re trying to limit their liability to somewhere around 44 million as I read this.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

That’s what I read too. So yeah, they’re trying to limit their liability to 44 million. Now, Craig, first the claimants and the claimants are going to be the death claimants potential personal injury claimants, the bridge operators, et cetera. The claimants are going to have to prove that the vessel owner was at fault. So they’re going to have to first establish negligence, and then the vessel owner gets to say, yeah, but it wasn’t personal negligence. And I say that’s the second time I’ve said that. And why I say that is because with a corporation, you got to find negligence high up the corporate ladder in order to have that privity or knowledge absent the privity or knowledge. If there’s fault, then everybody has to take out of that 44 million fund. If there’s no fault, of course there’d be no liability at all. But if there’s fault, they all have to take out of that $44 million fund. Now, there’s one other little curve on this, and the little curve is that after the Titanic, a few years after the Titanic, Congress amended the limitation of liability act to provide a limited fund for wrongful death and personal injury claimants. So what Congress said was is you take the tonnage of the ship and you multiply it by $420 and that fund the personal injury and claimants and death claimants have to get at least that $420 times the tonnage.

J. Craig Williams:

So that’s a fair amount of money. In this instance,

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

That could definitely be a fair amount of money.

J. Craig Williams:

So these people that were killed and potentially injured have this individual fund that they can pursue. What about the federal government, the Port of Baltimore, the people that own the cargo, what do they do?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

They don’t get a special fund. And even the death claimants and the personal injury claimants, they don’t get a special fund. They participate with everybody else. So let’s say with everybody else, they got a hundred dollars per ton, then and only then does the ship owner have to come up with this special fund to get them up to $420 per ton. But in the meantime, everybody is in that proceeding trying to say, Hey, this is what we’re entitled to.

J. Craig Williams:

All right. So we’re going to go back in time to the Johnny Carson Show and pull out Carmack or Carac and put the envelope up to your head. We’ll give you a little bit of a black robe here, maybe appoint you as judge for the time being based on what you know now, what do you think is going to happen?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

I think it’s going to take years for there to be any kind of ultimate resolution to this. I think that if the claimants can establish that the vessel was unseaworthy when it left the port or that there was some fault, then they’ll all try to recover from that fund and they will be definitely doing discovery and looking for culpability knowledge and responsibility up the ladder so that they can break the cap.

J. Craig Williams:

So once they prove that negligence, then they break that cap of $42 million

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Once they prove corporate negligence, if the captain is negligent, that’s probably not going to be enough. We’re going to have to see that somebody in the vessel owner’s corporate hierarchy knew what was going on, should have known what was going on, knew there were problems with the ship, so probably the captain or a helmsman not good enough. It’s going to have to be at that corporate level to break that gap.

J. Craig Williams:

Something like the captain was requesting money for repairs, didn’t get the money and the ship left without the repairs being done.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Correct, something like that. Now Craig, one thing not capable is there’s something called the rec act. And what the REC act says is it says if you’re ship wrecks and you’re sitting in navigable waters of the United States, even if it wasn’t your fault, you got to clean it up. If you don’t clean it up and the federal government has to clean it up, the federal government can come after you. And that is not subject to the cap.

J. Craig Williams:

So it’s open season,

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

You got it.

J. Craig Williams:

And Lloyd’s of London, Chubb, and everybody else is on the hook for the billions of dollars it’s supposedly going to take to fix all this

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Potentially. And that’s maybe one of the reasons why they want to settle these things quickly or at least they’re saying they want to get insurance payout quickly.

J. Craig Williams:

So what happens with the salvage value of vessel? I mean, who claims salvage rights on this? And can you explain what salvage rights mean?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Well, there’s a couple of things that salvage rights can mean. One thing that salvage rights can mean is just what’s the salvage value of the vessel? When your car is totaled, what’s the’s the heap of metal worth? But in admiralty, what salvage is is salvage is if somebody goes to the rescue of the ship and they get compensated if they save the ship. That’s really not, I don’t think that’s going to be applicable here because I think this ship will not be saved.

J. Craig Williams:

It seems like it’s going to be a wreck. We’ve got the Army Corps of Engineers tearing the bridge apart. What about ongoing vessel traffic to and from the Port of Baltimore?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Well, they’re working really hard, I think to open channels. The early channels that they’ve opened up, they they’re basically using to try to move the debris out and open up other channels. Then I think they’re looking at maybe another channel that smaller ships and barges could use. And then hopefully, I think I saw sometime by the end of May, they’ll be able to open up the main channel because as you know, for every day the port is essentially closed. We’re having goods diverted to other ports. We’re having folks who have goods sitting in the port trying to figure out how do we move this with the port closed? And we have folks who are not working, and we’ve already seen the evidence that there are businesses that businesses down because people aren’t working. So the economic displacement is huge.

J. Craig Williams:

And the people that have to cross that bridge, I mean, how long is it going to be before it’s rebuilt or can they

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Right, that’s exactly right. Well, obviously before it’s rebuilt years. So those folks are having to figure out other ways to go to work, other ways to get where they’re going. Major disaster.

J. Craig Williams:

We see the Army Corps of Engineers out there in Gaza building a dock for major ships. I know that in times of war, they can build bridges. Could they handle something like this on a temporary basis?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

I really don’t know. They can do, as you say, some pretty miraculous things. And I think they’re doing some pretty miraculous things right now to get the channels they’ve gotten open. Open. But this is a big project,

J. Craig Williams:

Tom, we’re going to take another quick break to hear a word from our sponsors when we come back. We’re going to be talking about the criminal aspect of some of these things. And welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m back with LSU Law professor and LSU President Emeritus Tom Galligan. Tom. This hearkens back to a tragic accident in 2019. There was a scuba dive boat fire in California on the conception where 34 people were killed and the captain was found guilty of Siemens manslaughter. Now, just as a point of disclosure here, I’m a scuba diver. I’ve been on that boat and I know exactly what happened in terms of why they couldn’t escape. In the back of the lower deck at the top bunk three bunks up, there is a small escape hatch that you can get to the back stern of the boat, but you have to be able to know where that is and crawl through it. And when I was on that boat, no drills were ever done, nor would they really showed us how to work it. It was just told to us. So my question to you is at this point, what happens with the criminal aspect of these cases? Is there any criminal liability here on the captain’s part like it was in the scuba dive bow fire?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

To answer that question, we’re going to need to see the results of the NTSB report and we’re going to need a lot more facts because there would have to be evidence of as some culpability that would rise to the level of manslaughter. Or worse, there is, if the evidence is there, there is the ability to prosecute. Cute.

J. Craig Williams:

We had loss of life here and we had loss of life in the maritime disaster. What’s necessary to establish criminal liability as they did in the dive boat fire?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

It’s not a whole lot different It is than it is on land. It’s a very, very similar scheme of manslaughter recklessness. There can be negligent homicide. There’s another, you talk about the conception. There is a case a few years ago in involving the Staten Island ferry where one of the folks piloting the ferry fell asleep and passed out. And both that person and people were killed and people were injured. Both that person and the person in the city of New York who had approved the basic plans for how many pilots you were supposed to have there, they both spent some time in prison.

J. Craig Williams:

Now I’ve read that in the dive boat action, the families sued the Coast Guard for their failure to inspect it. And I’m presuming the design of the boat,

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

I think probably for approving the design of the boat, the claims against the Coast Guard are tough because of public function, discretionary function, immunity and other things. But there is the possibility. My sense is that’s a little bit more Craig of a long shot.

J. Craig Williams:

Right Now. They calculate the value of the vessel when they file these lawsuits in admiralty as the basis or the number That’s right. They tie the value of the vessel to the amount of liability that the boat that has for what it did.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Yeah, they tie, yeah, absolutely. They decide the value of the vessel. Again, the post-disaster value of the vessel. And then the claims feed into, as we said before, into that fund.

J. Craig Williams:

So for the 34 families that lost their loved ones in the conception case, that boat dive boat couldn’t have been worth more than two or $300,000. They’re just out of luck. Right?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

They are out of luck. And then that loss of life amendment that we talked about before only applies to seagoing vessels. So I’m not sure that it did apply to the conception and in the wake of the conception, Congress actually amended the 1851 act to say that covered small passenger vessels cannot limit their liability, but the dolly is not a covered small passenger vessel.

J. Craig Williams:

Do you think we’re going to see some subsequent legislation because of this disaster?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

You, I don’t know. And the reason I pause is that I actually, Craig testified three times once to the House Judiciary Committee and twice to Senate committees after the Deepwater Horizon disaster about amending maritime, wrongful death statutes. And you would think if there was ever a time that Congress would’ve made recovery more beneficial, that would’ve been the time and they didn’t do it. So industry is a powerful force. But again, and I don’t want to sound like I’m on a soapbox, but you have an 1851 ACT that was passed before the corporate form was as prevalent as it is today before bankruptcy was available and before there were modern communication devices. So I would think it’d be a great time to take another look at the limitation of liability act.

J. Craig Williams:

So do you think that LSSU is going to put together a seminar class and maybe propose some model law changes to this whole thing? I think several other law schools have done similar things.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Yeah, I don’t don’t know if we’ll do that, but we’re definitely talking about it and we’re definitely studying it as, again, it’s a tragedy and it’s a human tragedy and it’s a maritime tragedy. But we have talked about it in my maritime course that I’m teaching this semester already. So the students, they’re understanding the issues, and I kind of liked your suggestions, so I may round some of them up.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, I know that when I went to the University of Iowa, and that’s why I was joking with you in the beginning about the LSU basketball games. One of our classes was a set of model laws on the new biology, which was at that time really an odd thing to kind of figure out what was going to be done. So just an opportunity there. Maybe it’s something that the LSU would pick up and help us out because it seems like it’s time, as you say.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

It is definitely time. I go back to my experience with the deep water horizon, though, is changing the law is a tough thing to do now. They did it after the conception, so it’s certainly possible. But yeah, no, I hear you. And I’m going to go talk to my students about it.

J. Craig Williams:

Great. Well, last thing I really want to talk about is the mayday that the ship put out right before. How does Mayday work? Who was listening? How did the information get transferred? What happened there?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Yeah. mayday is basically, you say to, in a situation like this, you say to all, you’re saying to all the ships in the port, and you’re saying to the port authorities, you’re sending out a general message that says, we are in serious, serious trouble. And I think except for the eight folks working on the bridge fixing potholes, the Mayday was amazingly successful in that they stopped cars from going on the bridge now and again, it was at one 30 in the morning. So the timing was fortunate that it wasn’t at eight o’clock in the morning or 10 o’clock in the morning. But you send out that mayday and it’s SOS, it’s alert and everybody hopefully reacts and takes action to minimize the damage. And they did.

J. Craig Williams:

Do you think that that a call will save their liability in this case? Will that help them in this Admiralty law?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

No, I think it will save their liability only in that there weren’t more people on the bridge who would be, thank God, who would be making claims against them. But I don’t think it will have any effect whatsoever on their ultimate responsibility.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, here’s my last question. Do we need to be making changes to all of our bridges and our ports around the country to prevent these accidents from happening? What do we need to do?

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Yeah, I think we need to take a look at infrastructure. I’m not running for office, but I think we’ve let our infrastructure slide. This is a wake up call that we need to do what we need to do to make sure that we are safe, that maritime transportation is safe, and that the folks like those poor eight folks working on that bridge are safe.

J. Craig Williams:

Yeah, because 30 or 40 ton barges are quite a bit different than a hundred million tons.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

They are. And we also know that a lot of those ships are carrying dangerous stuff, toxic hazardous materials, or for us down here in this neck of the woods when we lived through the deep water horizon oil. So yeah, it is time for us to fix some stuff.

J. Craig Williams:

Maybe we need to start putting those hazardous materials on smaller ships.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

I think we do that. Of course, they’re going to tell us that’s less efficient, but it’s scary to know some of what’s out there on the water

J. Craig Williams:

And what it can do once its spills.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Exactly.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Tom, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking with you and having you on the show. Thank you so much.

Thomas C. Galligan Jr.:

Alright, Craig, thank you. It’s been a pleasure to be with you.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, as Tom pointed out, we’ve got a long way to go. We’ve got some old laws applying to new situations with a multitude of things that have arisen since then that weren’t in existence back when these laws were passed some 175 years ago. And Heaven help us if the Supreme Court relies on its major questions and original jurisdiction doctrines that it’s putting forth because these are the laws that we have. As Tom pointed out, amendments have been made, changes have happened, but perhaps we’ll see some more changes in the future because of the size of these boats that are now loose in our ports and doing damage to bridges. It’s a dangerous situation for many. It interrupts commerce on a major scale, and it’s going to take a significant amount of money to solve because we’ve got to strengthen our bridges. We’ve got to escort these ships through these bridges and make sure that the inspections that the Coast Guard undertakes are done a little bit tighter as ships leave the port. Well, that’s it for Craig’s Ran on this topic. Let me know what you think. If you like what you heard today, please rate us on Apple Podcasts, your favorite podcasting app. You can also visit us at the legal talk network.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter. I’m Craig Williams. Thanks for listening. Please join us next time for another great legal topic. Remember, when you want legal think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.

Speaker 2:

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