Gerald McGill of the Levin Papantonio firm is quoted in the New York times about the possibility of legal claims by passengers.
Maritime Law
Submitted by Fred Levin on
Lawyers handling Jones Act cases, unseaworthy vessel cases, cruise line cases, pleasure boat and other maritime injury and death cases..
The Jones Act is a federal statute enacted in 1920 which allows an injured Jones Act seaman to sue his employer for the negligence of the employer or the seaman's co-employees and not be limited to the inadequate workers' compensation laws.
Caution: For workers injured on fixed platforms the time period for filing a claim may be as short as ONE year
HANDLING:
- Jones Act Seaman cases occurring on drilling rigs, production platforms, crewboat and supply vessels and aircraft servicing oil and gas production operations worldwide.
- Jones Act Seaman cases on tugs and towing vessels on the intracoastal waterway and other inland waterways through America.
- Injuries to crew members of ocean-going vessels of all types.
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Injury and death cases involving the
cruise line industry including passengers and
crew members. - Death on the High Seas Act (DOHSA)
- Private pleasure boat cases from personal water craft (jet ski, ski-doo, etc.) to houseboats, sport fishermen and luxury yachts.
- Unseaworthiness claims
- Collision cases
- Fishing vessel cases
In The News
In February,2012 I blogged about a Spanish company that was drilling a deepwater exploratory oil well 30 miles north of Cuba and just 70 miles south of the Florida Keys. view blog here. I expressed concern because the rig was drilling in water 6500 feet deep which is 1500 feet deeper than the water the Deepwater Horizon was drilling in at the time it was destroyed in 2010 causing the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.
On April 20, 2012, Levin, Papantonio attorney , Gerald A. McGill was honored at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy located in New London, Connecticut. He was inducted into the Wall of Gallantry and a plaque with his graduation yearbook photograph and his Citation was placed on the Wall located in Chase Hall which houses the entire Corps of Cadets. Mr. McGill was awarded a Bronze Star with Combat “V” for action against an enemy vessel during the Viet Nam war. The award was made by the President of the United States and signed by Admiral John J. Hyland, United States Navy, Commander in Chief, U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet. The Citation reads:
The Titanic is the most infamous ship of all times, but for Americans the super tanker Exxon Valdez is a close second.
On March 24. 1989 the Exxon Valdez ran aground on a well-marked reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound spilling at least 11 million gallons of crude oil into the Bay. As damaging as that spill turned out to be for the Alaskan ecosystem , it could have been much worse. The Exxon Valdez was a 1,000 foot long supertanker that was carrying 53 million gallons of crude oil from Valdez, Alaska to a refinery in Long Beach, Cqalifornia.
MOBILE, Ala. — The Coast Guard continues the search for three missing Coast Guard crewmembers and the salvage of the sunken helicopter in Mobile Bay, Thursday.
Overnight, a crew aboard the Ben R. Johnson, a 57-foot salvage vessel, recovered the helicopter fuselage from the bottom of Mobile Bay. The fuselage did not contain the bodies of the three missing crewmembers.
For the second time in as many months the Genoa Italy-based Costa Crociere Cruise Lines is receiving unwanted, unfavorable publicity in the world news. This time it is the cruise ship Costa Allegra which lost power and began drifting in the Indian Ocean after a fire in the ship's generator room. When at sea the generators supply all the electrical power for the ship. No one was reported injured in the fire but the ship was left without power, lights, communications, air conditioning or functioning toilets.
Last Friday Mike Underhill, a U.S. Justice Department lawyer who is the federal government's lead lawyer in an upcoming trial to determine fault for the 2010 blowout of the Macondo well off the Louisianna coast, urged judges to make public the voluminous documents, depositions and other evidence gathered in preparation for a Februaary 27, 2012 trial date in the United States District Court in New Orleans.
The Spanish Company Repsol has begun drilling a deep-water exploratory oil well approximately 31 miles north of Havana, Cuba and 70 miles south of the Florida Keys. The drill site is just south and west of Dry Tortugas the westernmost island in the Florida Keys.
Repsol has leased the Scarabeo 9, a state-of-the-art drilling rig built in China and Singapore, owned by an Italian company and flagged (registered) in the Bahamas.
Levin Papantonio Maritime attorney Gerald McGill is quoted in this Times article about the wreck of the Costa Concordia and the legal rights of passengers.
On Friday, October 28, 2011 the Coast Guard Cutter Cypress, which is homeported in Pensacola, Florida, offloaded 7 tons of cocaine at the Coast Guard base in St. Petersburg, Florida. The street value of the cocaine was worth roughly $180 million dollars which is about a third of what law enforcement pulls off the streets in a year in the entire United States. The cocaine came from a single, self-propelled semisubmersible vessel which had been detected and stopped by another Coast Guard Cutter off the coast of Honduras on September 30, 2011.
