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Editor: Rod Sullivan
Profession: Maritime Attorney

Category: Shipyard Accidents & Longshoreman Injuries

What duty does the Navy have to shipyard workers working aboard U.S. Naval vessels? There are three actually. First, it needs to turnover the ship to them in a reasonably safe condition. Secondly, it needs to warn them of hidden dangers. Finally, if Navy personnel see a shipyard worker doing something so dangerous that it is likely to cause injury, they have a duty to intervene. If the Navy breaches any of these three duties, then the shipyard worker can sue the Navy under the Public Vessels Act in what is called a 905(b) action. 905(b) is the section of the Longshore and Harbor Workers Act which permist third party suits.

A district court in Jacksonville recently re-affirmed those duties in a suit by a shipyard worker injured by a particularly loud loudspeaker.

Some would say that the USS John F. Kennedy been a unlucky ship. In 1975 she collided in the Ionian Sea with USS Belknap. The flight deck of the JFK sheared off the stack of the Belknap. The severed av-gas lines on the JFK poured aviation fuel gas straight down the Belknap's stack. Seven seamen on the Belknap were killed and 47 were wounded. Now, at over 40 years old, he's the oldest aircraft carrier in the U.S. fleet and is showing her age. The problem with older ships is that sometimes they can have hidden traps for shipyard workers doing repair work.

In 2001 a ship repair crew from Norfolk was working on the JFK in Mayport, Florida when a worker was knocked off a ladder by a ship's loudspeaker. The worker, who had served in the Navy, knew how loud such speakers should be. However, while he was working on a ladder in the overhead, morning colors were sounded. The sound was so loud that it blew out his eardrum, leaving him partially deaf and without a good sense of balance.

A district judge in Jacksonville, Florida recently ruled that the Navy breached its duty to warn of hidden dangers when it failed to warn the shipyard worker that the loudspeakers had been turned up to their highest possible volume.

Apparently, on the 03 level of the JFK, machinery noises had gotten so loud that personnel couldn't hear announcements while the ship was underway. Consequently the IC (internal communications) department turned the speakers in that area to their highest volume and then disabled the volume adjustment so that they couldn't be turned down. The problem was, if you weren't a regular part of the crew, you had no way to know how loud the speakers were.

They Navy denied that the speaker volume was turned up, but a former member of the IC Department, who responded to an advertisement in a newspaper asking for information about the speaker system, and who had since left the Navy, agreed to truthfully tell about the modifications which had been made.