Court Opinion

ID: 9449660
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:18:21.011004+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:31:55.704327
License: Public Domain

J. JOSEPH SMITH, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I dissent.
Although I agree that the negligence of the stevedore in using a rope sling passed under the sharp-edged metal underpinning of the baggage conveyor is not a fault of the shipowner, the use of the rope sling with the lift to position the conveyor in the side port of the vessel made the apparatus obviously unfit as a place for the longshoreman to work and the vessel unseaworthy. Attaching the conveyor to the pad-eye on the ship I would hold “seaman’s work,” under Seas Shipping v. Sieracki, 328 U.S. 85, 66 S. Ct. 872, 90 L.Ed. 1099 (1946), and the injury suffered from the use of the faulty equipment a proper charge against the ship, a part of the cost of carriage, through the unseaworthiness doctrine of liability without fault of the ship, even though, as in Petterson, the defective equipment to be used in discharging the cargo was furnished by the stevedore (Alaska S.S. Co. v. Petterson, 347 U.S. 396, 74 S.Ct. 601, 98 L.Ed. 798 (1954), affirming 205 F.2d 478 (9 Cir., 1953)). While the longshoreman was not in the usual sense on the vessel when injured, he was in contact with the ship between the wharf and the ship, and in making the gangway the connection between the ship and the wharf he was doing work which historically was part of a seaman’s work. See The Osceola, 189 U.S. 158, 23 S.Ct. 483, 47 L.Ed. 760 (1903), where a seaman was injured on board a vessel at sea while preparing a cargo gangway for use when the ship should tie up at the pier.