Court Opinion

ID: 9481248
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:12:14.326374+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:10.549204
License: Public Domain

PATRICK E. HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur in the conclusion reached by Judge Wisdom’s able opinion and with much of its reasoning. I write separately, but briefly, to accent what we do not decide and to explain my differing view, an exercise I would not undertake if these issues appeared infrequently. I think it clear that Fontenot falls within the LHWCA’s coverage. He was injured while in transit on navigable waters, he spent thirty percent of his time working on vessels, and he was returning from work on a vessel at the time of his injury. We do not decide more. We do not reach the case, for example, of injury in transit on navigable waters of a worker on fixed platforms.
I must depart from the discussion of Herb’s Welding and Chesapeake, as applied to workers on vessels. Herb’s Welding and Chesapeake address the LHWCA’s status test in the context of a land-based or other non-vessel situs. After Perini, and the second footnote in Herb’s Welding, any work on a vessel in navigable waters in the course of employment is maritime employment; the character of the work is irrelevant. “[W]hen a worker is injured on the actual navigable waters in the course of his employment on those waters, he satisfies the status requirement in § 2(3) ...” Perini, 459 U.S. at 324, 103 S.Ct. at 650.
The parties saw the status issue in a different light; they focused on whether two of our cases, Pippen v. Shell Oil Co., 661 F.2d 378 (5th Cir.1981), and Boudreaux v. American Workover, Inc., 664 F.2d 463 (5th Cir.1981), survive Herb’s Welding. Both cases involved wireline operators injured while working on floating barges; we held that they met the LHWCA’s status test. It seems clear that the results in both cases survive Herb’s Welding, but not all of the reasoning.