Section 905(b) Vessel Negligence Claims for Injured Longshore Workers

Two things need to be said plainly at the outset.

First, being injured aboard a vessel does not, by itself, create a Section 905(b) claim. The law asks whether the vessel—meaning the ship's owner, operator, charterer, or crew, acting in its vessel capacity rather than as your employer—owed you a specific duty, breached it, and caused your injury. Many serious injuries aboard ships are caused by the stevedore's own methods or equipment and give rise to no vessel liability at all. Others are caused by conditions the ship's crew created, controlled, or knew about, and those can support a lawsuit for damages that compensation benefits never cover. The vessel is often a company separate from your employer, but not always; the same company can occupy both roles, and the statute imposes specific limits when it does. That question is taken up below.

Second, you do not need to have this figured out before asking for a review. Most injured workers do not know who owns the vessel, whether the company that hired them also chartered the ship, or whether they are properly classified as a longshore worker rather than a seaman. Sorting those questions out is legal work, and it starts with the facts of the accident, not with the answers.

The Young Firm is a New Orleans maritime injury law firm serving injured workers across Louisiana and the Gulf Coast. Reviewing a possible vessel claim comes down to three things: what duty the vessel owed under federal law, who the responsible party is, and what evidence exists to prove control and knowledge. That review can begin with whatever you know today. For the firm's broader longshore practice, see Longshore and Harbor Worker claims.

LHWCA Benefits and a Section 905(b) Lawsuit Are Different Claims

A common misunderstanding: workers assume that once they accept compensation checks, they have made their choice and cannot sue anyone. That is not what the statute says. Section 933(a) of the LHWCA provides that a worker who is entitled to compensation does not have to elect between compensation and a damages action against a third party. The two claims run on different tracks, are usually brought against different parties, and require different proof. Where one company is both your employer and the vessel, the vessel claim is subject to the restrictions explained in the next section.

Three points deserve emphasis because they are frequently misunderstood.

Filing for benefits does not start a vessel lawsuit. OWCP administers compensation. It does not sue the ship for you, and nothing in the benefits process files or preserves a negligence claim. The lawsuit must be brought separately and within its own deadline, discussed below.

You do not recover twice for the same loss. Section 933 contains provisions that give the employer and carrier a credit or reimbursement out of a third-party recovery. A vessel claim can add to what you receive, but the arithmetic involves offsets that must be understood before you evaluate any offer.

Section 905(b) liability cannot be based on unseaworthiness. The statute says so directly:

"The liability of the vessel under this subsection shall not be based upon the warranty of seaworthiness or a breach thereof at the time and place of injury." — 33 U.S.C. § 905(b)

Unseaworthiness is a strict-liability doctrine available to Jones Act seamen, not to LHWCA-covered workers. If you have read about unseaworthiness claims or Jones Act remedies, understand that those belong to a different category of worker. A longshore worker's vessel claim rises or falls on negligence.

For what the Act itself pays, see LHWCA medical and disability benefits. For how benefits and litigation are coordinated in practice, see third-party claims alongside LHWCA benefits.

Who Can Bring a Section 905(b) Claim—and When Is a Vessel Employer Protected?

Eligibility for a vessel claim requires looking at four questions together. None of them is answered by a job title alone.

Are you covered by the LHWCA?

Section 905(b) applies to "a person covered under this chapter." Coverage depends on the employee definition and exclusions in 33 U.S.C. § 902 and the situs requirement in § 903. The Act excludes, among others, a master or member of a crew of any vessel—that is, Jones Act seamen. Workers who spend substantial time aboard vessels sometimes sit near the line between the two systems, and the answer changes which remedies exist. See workers covered by the LHWCA for the coverage analysis; if you are unsure whether you might be a seaman, see Jones Act seaman status.

Who counts as "the vessel"?

The statutory definition in 33 U.S.C. § 902(21) is broader than the name on the registration. It includes the vessel itself and its owner, owner pro hac vice, agent, operator, charterer or bareboat charterer, master, officer, or crew member. This matters because ships are often owned by one company, operated by another, and chartered to a third. Being within the definition, however, only identifies a potential defendant. It does not establish that the party was negligent. For a broader introduction to identifying a responsible vessel party, see claims involving vessel-owner negligence.

Is your employer also the vessel?

Under 33 U.S.C. § 905(a), the employer's liability for compensation is exclusive—you generally cannot sue your employer for negligence. But some employers wear two hats: a company that employs longshore workers may also own, operate, or charter the ship. Section 905(b) addresses this "dual capacity" situation with two occupation-specific rules that must be kept separate.

Workers employed by the vessel to provide stevedoring services. The statute provides that if the worker was employed by the vessel to provide stevedoring services, no action is permitted "if the injury was caused by the negligence of persons engaged in providing stevedoring services to the vessel." Read carefully, this restriction is tied to the source of the negligence. It does not, on its face, bar every claim against a vessel that employed the worker as a stevedore; it bars claims where the negligence was that of people performing the stevedoring work. Whether a particular claim can proceed against a vessel-employer in its vessel capacity depends on what exactly caused the injury and on the controlling precedent applied to those facts.

Workers employed to provide shipbuilding, repairing, or breaking services. The rule here is different and stricter. If such a worker's employer was the owner, owner pro hac vice, agent, operator, or charterer of the vessel, the statute bars any action "in whole or in part or directly or indirectly" against the employer "in any capacity," and against the employer's employees. For a ship repair worker injured aboard a vessel the employer owns or operates, this restriction can eliminate the vessel claim entirely. It does not affect claims against a genuinely separate vessel interest.

These restrictions turn on the actual relationships among the companies involved, which are often not obvious from the worker's paycheck. Before assessing a dual-capacity question, counsel needs the employment arrangement, the vessel's ownership and charter structure, and any contracts governing the work. If you do not have those documents, that is expected; they are typically obtained during the investigation.

The Three Vessel Duties: Turnover, Active Control, and Intervention

The legal framework for vessel negligence toward longshore workers comes from Scindia Steam Navigation Co. v. De Los Santos, 451 U.S. 156 (1981). The Supreme Court described the relationship this way: the stevedore is an expert in cargo operations and bears primary responsibility for the safety of its workers, and the vessel is not an insurer of the stevedore's workplace. Absent a contract, positive law, or custom to the contrary, the vessel has no general duty to supervise or inspect the stevedore's ongoing operations to discover dangers arising within them.

Within that framework, the Court identified three circumstances in which the vessel can be liable. Each has its own trigger and its own limits, and they should be understood separately.

The turnover duty

This duty concerns the condition of the ship and its equipment at the moment the vessel turns them over to the stevedore. It has two parts.

The first is a duty of reasonable care: the vessel must exercise ordinary care to turn over the ship and its equipment in a condition that an expert and experienced stevedore, aware of the ordinary hazards of the work, can carry on cargo operations with reasonable safety.

The second is a duty to warn, and it is narrower. Howlett v. Birkdale Shipping Co., 512 U.S. 92 (1994), explains that the vessel must warn the stevedore of latent hazards in the ship or its cargo stow that are known to the vessel, or should be known to it in the exercise of reasonable care, and that are likely to be encountered by the stevedore and not known to the stevedore or reasonably discoverable by a competent stevedore. Howlett also confirmed the limit: the vessel is not required to inspect or supervise a prior stevedore's loading work to find hidden defects in the stow. The duty to warn attaches to what the vessel knew or should have known from its own conduct—not to everything that might be wrong with the cargo.

Because both parts are measured at turnover, the timing of when the hazard appeared is often decisive. A defect that existed when the crew handed over a hatch is a turnover question. A defect the stevedore's own workers created an hour later generally is not.

The active-control duty

Turnover is not always complete. Vessels frequently keep control of certain areas, equipment, or aspects of the operation—ship's cranes operated by crew, ballast and trim, hatch covers the crew opens and closes, gangways the vessel rigs, or areas of the deck the crew continues to use. Under Scindia, the vessel may be liable if it actively involves itself in the cargo operations and negligently injures a longshore worker, or if it fails to exercise due care to avoid exposing workers to harm from hazards in areas or equipment under the vessel's active control.

The necessary connection is control over the specific thing that caused the injury. The fact that the crew was somewhere aboard the ship is not active control of the winch that failed. Ownership of the equipment, by itself, is not control either. But the reverse is also true: the stevedore's hands on the controls does not by itself end the inquiry if the crew retained responsibility for maintaining, rigging, or directing the equipment or area. What matters is who was actually directing, operating, or maintaining the relevant area or equipment at the time, and that is a factual question answered by records and witnesses rather than by labels.

The duty to intervene

This is the narrowest of the three. Once cargo operations are underway and the stevedore is in control, the vessel is generally entitled to rely on the stevedore to remedy dangers that arise. Scindia recognized an exception: where the vessel has actual knowledge of a dangerous condition, and actual knowledge that the stevedore, exercising obviously improvident judgment, intends to continue working in the face of it and cannot be relied upon to correct it, the vessel may have a duty to intervene.

Two knowledge requirements, both actual. It is not enough that the crew could have discovered the hazard, and it is not enough that the crew knew of a hazard while the stevedore was still evaluating what to do about it. The stevedore's continued conduct in the face of the known danger is what triggers the vessel's obligation. Courts have described this duty narrowly, and how it applies to a particular operation—especially outside classic stevedoring—depends on the controlling precedent for the court hearing the case.

Putting the duties beside the evidence

The table below connects each duty to the facts that trigger it, its principal limits, and the records that tend to matter. The limits in each row belong with that row; none of these duties makes the vessel automatically liable.

Four expressly hypothetical illustrations show how a duty attaches to facts. None describes a case handled by the firm, and in each the vessel's liability would still depend on proving breach and causation.

• Safe condition at turnover. A hatch ladder has a rung the crew noted as loose in a maintenance log two ports earlier and never repaired. A longshore worker descending at the start of the shift falls when the rung gives way. The question is whether the vessel exercised reasonable care in turning over the ladder in that condition.
• Duty to warn. The crew knows from the prior port that a tier of palletized cargo sits over a layer of loose plastic sheeting hidden from view. No one tells the discharging stevedore. A worker steps onto the sheeting and falls. Whether a warning duty arose depends on what the vessel actually knew and whether a competent stevedore would have found it.
• Active control. The ship's crane, operated by a crew member because the terminal's crane is down, swings a load into a longshore worker positioned where the crew signalman directed. If the evidence shows the vessel was operating the equipment and directing the movement, the analysis turns to whether that operation was negligent.
• Duty to intervene. The chief mate watches a stevedore gang keep running a ship's winch after its brake has visibly failed twice in ten minutes, says nothing, and a worker is struck when the load drops. The analysis asks what the mate actually saw and whether the stevedore's decision to keep working was obviously improvident.

In any case, the same three questions sort the facts: What was the condition of the ship, gear, and stow when the crew handed it over, and what did the crew know? Was the crew still operating, rigging, or directing anything connected to the injury? And did the crew actually see a danger develop and actually see the stevedore keep working in the face of it? The first is turnover territory, the second active control, the third intervention—and the third is the hardest to establish.

Crane, forklift, container, and loading accidents in general are discussed on longshore accident and injury scenarios and loading and unloading injuries.

Does an Obvious Hazard or My Own Mistake Defeat a Vessel Claim?

Injured workers often hear, sometimes within hours of an accident, that the incident was their fault, or that the hazard was obvious, or that their own company caused it. Each of these is a different legal question with a different consequence. None should be treated as settled because it appears in an incident report.

What if I was partly at fault?

Maritime law generally applies comparative fault to a longshore worker's negligence claim against a vessel. If a court finds that your own negligence contributed to the injury, your damages are typically reduced in proportion to your share of fault rather than eliminated. This is a damages question. It assumes the vessel's liability has been established and then asks how much of the loss the vessel should bear. A worker who was partly careless can still have a valid claim; the value of the claim is what changes.

What if the hazard was obvious?

This is a different kind of question, and it goes to liability rather than to the size of the recovery. The turnover duty to warn, as Howlett describes it, does not extend to hazards that are open and obvious or that a competent stevedore would discover. If the only theory of vessel negligence is a failure to warn about a condition anyone could see, that theory is in serious trouble.

But an obvious hazard does not necessarily end every analysis. The duty to turn over the ship in reasonably safe condition, the active-control duty, and the duty to intervene are not the same as the duty to warn, and the obviousness of a condition plays a different role in each. Courts have also considered situations in which a worker had no practical alternative but to confront an obvious hazard to do the job. Whether any such consideration applies to a particular case depends on the precedent controlling in the court hearing it and on the facts. The honest answer is that an obvious hazard is a significant problem for one theory of liability and a factor to be analyzed under others—not an automatic bar, and not irrelevant.

What if my employer or the stevedore was negligent?

Stevedore negligence does not prove vessel negligence, and it does not disprove it either. The stevedore is responsible for its own methods, equipment, training, and supervision; the vessel is responsible for the limited duties described above. In many accidents, the stevedore's fault fully explains the injury and there is no vessel claim. In others, the stevedore's conduct and the vessel's conduct both contributed—the crew turned over a defective winch, and the gang kept using it after it failed—and each party's conduct requires separate analysis.

One structural feature of Section 905(b) matters here. The statute provides that the employer shall not be liable to the vessel for damages, directly or indirectly, and voids agreements to the contrary. The vessel cannot shift its own liability back onto your employer. That does not change the fact that you cannot sue your employer for negligence, but it means that concurrent employer fault is a matter the vessel must address in court rather than a reason to stop investigating.

The same equipment failure can point three different ways

Consider a single incident: a wire rope on a cargo hook parts and a load falls on a longshore worker. Depending on the evidence, this could be:

• A vessel claim, if the rope was part of the ship's gear, the crew's maintenance records show it was overdue for replacement, and it was turned over in that condition.
• A non-vessel third-party claim, if the rope belonged to the terminal operator or a rigging contractor, or if it failed because of a manufacturing defect—see contractor or terminal-operator negligence and maritime product and equipment liability.
• A compensation-only claim, if the rope was the stevedore's own equipment and the stevedore's inspection lapse is the only negligence involved.

The injury is identical in all three. The legal outcome is not. That is why the investigation focuses on ownership, maintenance, control, and knowledge rather than on the injury alone.

What a Vessel-Claim Investigation Adds

The table above lists the records that speak to each duty. What counsel adds is the ability to get those records, test them against what people actually did, and do both before the evidence leaves the port.

Getting records the worker cannot. Charter parties, stevedoring contracts, terminal agreements, deck and maintenance logs, stow plans, crew communications, and vessel incident reports are held by the vessel, the stevedore, and the terminal. They are obtained through preservation requests and, once suit is filed, through discovery. Ships sail, video systems overwrite, and logs are archived offshore, so the timing of the first preservation request can decide whether the evidence exists at all.

Reading paper against conduct. Documents are not self-executing. A charter party that assigns crane operation to the vessel does not establish control if the stevedore's own crane was in use that day; a maintenance log that shows a repair does not establish safe condition if the repair was inadequate. Contracts show how responsibility was allocated; deck logs, crane assignments, and witness accounts show how it was exercised. Both matter, and they do not always match. That is why accounts from the gang, the crew, and anyone on the dock are pursued early, while memories are specific.

Proving actual knowledge. The intervention duty cannot be established without evidence of what the crew actually knew and when. Radio traffic, messages between the ship's officers and the stevedore superintendent, mate's log entries, and post-incident statements are the primary source, and the vessel's own incident report is measured against the stevedore's. Where the two disagree, the disagreement itself is informative.

A clearly hypothetical illustration of why control drives the analysis: a longshore worker is injured when a gangway shifts as the tide changes. If the evidence shows the vessel rigged the gangway, its crew was responsible for tending it as the ship rose and fell, and the crew failed to do so, the claim is analyzed under the active-control duty and would still require proof that the failure caused the injury. If the terminal supplied and tended the gangway from the dock, the vessel's role may be limited to whether it had actual knowledge of a developing danger—a much narrower question, and one that may point toward the terminal operator rather than the ship. Same accident, same injury, and the legal analysis turns on a fact the injured worker may never have thought to notice.

What to Preserve After a Possible Section 905(b) Vessel Injury

Your health comes first. Get medical care, follow it, and report the injury to your employer accurately and promptly. Nothing below should delay treatment or put you back into an unsafe area.

Beyond that, the following materials are useful if they are lawfully available to you. Do not take records you are not permitted to have, do not return to restricted areas to take photographs, and do not violate workplace access rules to gather evidence. Counsel can pursue what you cannot.

Basic facts to write down now, while they are fresh:

• Date, time, and location of the accident, including the terminal or berth and the specific area of the ship
• The vessel's name, if you know it, and anything you know about who owned or operated it
• Your employer's name and the name of the stevedoring company or contractor you were working for, if different
• The task you were performing and who directed you to perform it that way
• When the hazard first appeared—was it there when you started the shift, or did it develop during the work?
• Who controlled the equipment or area involved, and whether it was the ship's gear or the stevedore's
• Whether anyone warned anyone about the hazard, who gave the warning, and who received it
• Names and contact information for coworkers, crew members, or anyone else who saw what happened

Materials to keep, unedited and undeleted:

• Photographs or video you already have of the scene, the equipment, or your injuries
• Text messages, emails, or other communications about the accident, the hazard, or the work
• Any incident report you were given or asked to sign, and anything you were asked to sign that you did not understand
• Medical records, discharge instructions, and bills
• All correspondence about your compensation benefits, including any notices from OWCP, your employer, or the carrier
• Any release, settlement paper, or agreement anyone has proposed to you—do not sign it before a lawyer has reviewed it

Do not alter, annotate, or delete original messages or photographs. Preserve them as they are, and make copies rather than editing originals.

Compensation notice and filing deadlines are separate from the lawsuit deadline and are covered on LHWCA notice and filing deadlines.

Vessel-Negligence Damages and the Risk of Signing a Third-Party Settlement

Statutory compensation is calculated by formula and capped by statute. A negligence action against the vessel is not. A successful Section 905(b) claim may recover compensatory damages under general maritime law, which, depending on proof and applicable precedent, can include:

• Past and future medical expenses
• Past lost wages and loss of future earning capacity
• Physical pain and suffering
• Mental anguish and loss of enjoyment of life

These are the categories the compensation system does not pay in full or does not pay at all. Whether any particular category is available, and in what amount, depends on the evidence in the case; no figure can be estimated from the type of injury alone.

What comes out of a recovery

A vessel recovery does not simply stack on top of compensation. Section 933 gives the employer and carrier rights in the third-party recovery, including reimbursement of compensation and medical benefits already paid and a credit against future compensation. Litigation expenses are also typically accounted for in that arithmetic. The result is that the net effect of a vessel claim on what you ultimately receive has to be calculated case by case, and any offer from a vessel interest should be evaluated with those offsets in mind, not against its face amount.

Section 933(g): the settlement trap

This is the single most important warning on this page. Under 33 U.S.C. § 933(g), if a worker who is entitled to compensation settles with a third party for less than the compensation to which the worker would be entitled under the Act, the employer's liability for compensation continues only if the employer and carrier gave written approval of the settlement before it was executed and the approval is filed as the statute requires. Separately, the worker must notify the employer of any third-party settlement or judgment. If the approval requirement applies and is not met, or if the notice is not given, the statute provides that all rights to compensation and medical benefits terminate.

In plain terms: signing a release with a ship's insurer without the required approval and notice can end your compensation checks and your medical coverage, regardless of how the settlement compares to what you were owed. The exact conditions under which these consequences attach have been the subject of judicial interpretation, and the details matter. Do not sign any release, settlement, or agreement with a vessel interest, a terminal, a contractor, or any other party until a lawyer has reviewed how Section 933 applies to it.

Assignment of the claim

Section 933(b) contains a further trap. If you accept compensation under an award in a compensation order and then do not file suit against the third party within six months of the award, the claim can be assigned to your employer by operation of the statute. Whether an "award" has been entered, and what that means for your right to control the vessel claim, is a question that should be answered before the six-month window is a concern rather than after.

How Long Do I Have to Sue the Vessel?

The general limitations period for a maritime personal injury action is three years from the day the cause of action arose, under 46 U.S.C. § 30106. That is the baseline for most Section 905(b) claims, and it is subject to exceptions and complications that have to be checked for each case:

• Government-owned or -operated vessels. Claims involving public vessels are governed by separate statutes with their own procedural requirements and shorter deadlines. Whether the vessel was government-owned or chartered is a threshold question.
• Accrual. When the cause of action "arose" is usually the date of injury, but not always; injuries that develop over time or are discovered later raise their own questions.
• Assignment under Section 933(b). As explained above, accepting compensation under an award can trigger a six-month period after which the claim may pass to your employer, well before three years.
• Contractual and procedural requirements. Charter parties, terminal agreements, and forum provisions can affect where and how the claim proceeds.

Filing a compensation claim with OWCP does not preserve the vessel lawsuit. Reporting the injury to your employer does not preserve it either. Those steps protect your benefits, and their deadlines are covered on LHWCA notice and filing deadlines. A vessel action generally must be filed in court within the applicable period, and a benefits filing is not a substitute. The law does recognize exceptions in some circumstances, but whether any applies to your case is a question for a lawyer, not an assumption to build a plan around. In particular, do not assume that ongoing negotiations with a vessel interest or its insurer, or the fact that compensation checks are still arriving, extends the lawsuit deadline. Neither should be treated as buying time. Because the correct deadline depends on facts that are not always apparent to the injured worker, the safest approach is to have the question answered early rather than to assume three years applies. And if you believe the deadline has already passed, ask anyway. Accrual, assignment, and any applicable exceptions are fact-specific, and the answer is not always what it first appears.

Legal Authorities Behind This Section 905(b) Guide

The statutory discussion on this page draws on the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act, 33 U.S.C. § 901 et seq., and specifically on § 902 (definitions, including the definition of "vessel" in § 902(21)), § 903 (coverage), § 904(b) (compensation payable irrespective of fault), § 905(a) and (b) (exclusivity of employer liability and the vessel negligence action), and § 933 (third-party claims, credits, assignment, and settlement approval). The three-year limitations period comes from 46 U.S.C. § 30106.

The vessel-duty framework comes from two Supreme Court decisions. Scindia Steam Navigation Co. v. De Los Santos, 451 U.S. 156 (1981), held that the vessel owes a longshore worker no general duty to supervise or inspect the stevedore's operations and identified the three circumstances—turnover, active control, and the duty to intervene—in which vessel liability can arise. Howlett v. Birkdale Shipping Co., 512 U.S. 92 (1994), defined the scope of the turnover duty to warn and its limits, including that the vessel need not inspect a prior stevedore's stow for hidden defects.

Three cautions about how to read this material. First, the Supreme Court set the framework, but the federal courts of appeals and district courts have applied it to varied facts over decades, and the precedent that controls a particular case depends on where suit is filed. Within that framework, individual facts—who controlled what, who knew what, and when—drive the outcome. Second, guidance from the U.S. Department of Labor about compensation benefits addresses the administration of those benefits; it does not establish the negligence standards a court applies to a vessel under Section 905(b). Third, this page is general information about how these authorities fit together. It is not a legal opinion about any individual claim and should not be relied on as one. Whether a vessel claim exists in a given case can only be answered by applying the controlling law to the specific facts.

What The Young Firm Needs to Evaluate a Possible Vessel Claim

You do not need complete information to ask for a review. Most workers who contact a maritime lawyer after a vessel injury do not know who owned the ship, whether their employer had any interest in it, or whether a Section 905(b) claim is even the right framework. Those are the questions the review answers.

What helps at the outset, to the extent you have it:

• Your employer's name and the name of any stevedoring company, contractor, or terminal you were working for or at
• The vessel's name, if known
• The date and place of the accident, including the terminal or berth
• The task you were performing and who directed the work
• Who controlled the equipment or area involved, and whether it was the ship's gear or the stevedore's
• Names of witnesses, including coworkers and crew
• Your current benefits status—whether you have reported the injury, whether compensation is being paid, and whether any award has been entered
• Any release, settlement, or agreement anyone has proposed to you

If you have some of this and not the rest, that is normal. Employment records, charter and ownership structures, and the vessel's own documents are obtained during the investigation, not supplied by the worker. What cannot be recovered later is time: vessel records, terminal video, and witness memories degrade quickly, and the assignment and limitations rules described above run whether or not anyone is watching them.

If you were injured aboard or alongside a vessel while working as a longshore, harbor, or shipyard worker in New Orleans, elsewhere in Louisiana, or along the Gulf Coast, and you want to know whether the ship's conduct gives you a claim beyond compensation, contact The Young Firm to have the facts reviewed. For the firm's broader longshore practice and the benefits side of your claim, start with Longshore and Harbor Worker claims.