Court Opinion

ID: 9447386
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 22:33:43.320899+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:01.128297
License: Public Domain

On Petition for Rehearing.
Plaintiff has filed a petition for rehearing, citing the case of Rich v. Ellerman & Bucknall S.S. Co., Ltd., decided by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit a day after the instant case, 278 F.2d 704. In Rich the stevedores loading the ship left some of the stow a “dangerous working platform” in the hold, which gave way when the plaintiff longshoreman stepped on it. The decision that a portion of the ship may be made unseaworthy by an act of a stevedore presents no novel principle. Grillea v. United States, 2 Cir., 1956, 232 F.2d 919. It is quite another step to say, as plaintiff does, that because a stevedore may have made negligent use, or negligent choice,* of equipment in which it is bringing freight aboard, the ship becomes unseaworthy. The possible transitory nature of a condition of unseaworthiness has been accented since our opinion herein. Mitchell v. Trawler Racer, Inc., 1960, 80 S.Ct. 926. But we do not believe that unseaworthiness is to be equated with mere negligent conduct. Cf. Blankenship v. Ellerman’s Wilson Line New York, Inc., 4 Cir., 1959, 265 F.2d 455 (a case considerably stronger for the seaman.) If a winchman employed by a stevedore negligently lowered a boom onto a longshoreman, it would be true, in a sense, that the longshoreman had not been working in a safe place. But absent a showing that the winchman was an unfit individual we could not say that the vessel was unseaworthy.
The petition for rehearing is denied.

 While we held that the jury might have found that the rolls were inadequately made fast to the board, the statement iu our opinion about negligent choice of a wrong type of board was cumulative, only. Our primary holding as to that aspect of the case was that there was no evidence warranting a finding that it was the wrong type of board.