Opinion ID: 6114
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Arco's Ownership/Operation of the Platform and Dock

Text: 17 Forrester advances an additional theory of recovery in his brief, to wit: As owner/operator of the platform and dock, Arco owed a duty of safe ingress and egress to Forrester. To strengthen his position, Forrester notes that Arco's employee directed the captain where to dock the vessel for disembarking. 18 Again, we are aware of no cases in this circuit holding a platform owner liable for the safe eventual disembarkment of a subcontractor's employee back at the onshore dock. The only relevant case provided by Forrester is Moore, discussed above. In that case, Moore transferred himself from the vessel to the platform (not the onshore dock) by swinging from a rope attached to a beam on the platform. When the rope broke Moore fell to the platform and was injured. In addressing the question of liability, we stated: 19 [T]he traditional allocation of duties between employer/platform owner, time charterer and vessel owner places liability for harm on the party that is most directly responsible for the dangerous condition that caused the harm.... [E]ither ODECO as platform owner-employer, Co-Mar as vessel owner, or both were responsible for Moore's egress from the vessel to the fixed platform. As the platform owner, ODECO as employer controlled the rope's physical condition and knew or could be charged with knowledge that the rope was not safe for the purpose intended. As the vessel owner, Co-Mar was responsible for access to and from its boat. The rope swing is an artificial means of ingress and egress to and from the fixed platform. The responsibility for the hazards it presents falls either on the platform owner-employer or on the vessel owner or both but, in any event, outside of the traditional duties of a time charterer. 11 20 The instant case, however, is distinguishable from Moore in several respects. First, Forrester was not moving between the platform and the vessel, but between the vessel and the dock. Moore stands for the proposition that some duty is owed by a platform owner to its employee for his safe movement between the vessel and the platform when the artificial means of ingress is part of the platform. There is, however, no support for a broad rule that Arco, as platform owner, owes a duty to an employee to deliver him safely to the dock. Second, in Moore, the worker was a common law employee of the platform owner, thereby implicating the duty of an employer to provide a safe work place for its employees. Even if we were to view the independent contractor, Forrester, in the same light as a common law employee of Arco, however, his work station was not the dock but the platform, so the Moore duty does not attach to Forrester's disembarkation at the dock. 21 The issue of whether Arco as owner/operator of the dock owed a duty of safe ingress and egress to Forrester is controlled by our decision in Florida Fuels, Inc. v. Citgo Petroleum, Corp., 6 F.3d 330 (5th Cir.1993). In Florida Fuels, the barge OSPREY berthed at a dock owned and operated by Citgo Petroleum Corp. (Citgo). Id. at 331. After securing the barge, Carl Authement was ascending a ladder to return to the barge when he fell and struck his head on the pier, and drowned. Id. Authement's parents and children filed a maritime suit against Citgo. Id. The issue in Florida Fuels was whether Citgo owed a duty to Authement to provide a means of access between the dock and the vessel. Id. at 332. We concluded that maritime law imposed no duty on a dock owner to provide a means of access to a vessel for the vessel's crew members. Id. at 334. We further concluded that the only duty established by Louisiana law was to provide a dock which was reasonably safe. Id. Because there was no defect in the dock itself, we ruled that Citgo did not breach its duty to maintain a reasonably safe premises as a matter of law. Id. 22 Forrester's argument that Arco, as the dock owner, owed him a duty of safe ingress/egress from the vessel to the dock is, therefore, meritless. The only duty that was owed to Forrester was the duty, under Louisiana law, for Arco to provide a dock which was reasonably safe. Here, the district court expressly found that the passengers did not wait long enough for a gangway to be put in place. Accordingly, there was no defect in the dock that caused the accident; rather, it was the hurried and undisciplined nature of the disembarking procedure--legally under the control of the vessel's crew--that caused the problem. 23 In addition, Forrester insists that Arco was negligent because it directed the vessel to the east dock, which was lower than the west dock. According to Forrester, had the crewboat docked at the higher west dock, there would have been a shorter distance for Forrester to jump. This argument is meritless, as it presupposes that Arco knew that the passengers would refuse to wait for the gangplank, instead choosing, in the words of the crewboat captain, to jump [l]ike [lemmings] off a cliff. IV