Titanic law helps ship owner limit bridge collapse liability – Hartford Courant

Ethan M Steinberg, Chris Dolmetsch, Matthew Griffin | Bloomberg News (TNS)

The owner of the ship that rammed into a Baltimore bridge could face hundreds of millions of dollars in damage claims after the accident sent vehicles plunging into the water and threw the eastern U.S. transportation network into chaos.

But legal experts said there is a path for reducing liability under an obscure 19th-century law once invoked by the owner of the Titanic to limit its payout for the 1912 sinking.

At the center of the legal fallout will be Singapore-based Grace Ocean, owner of the container ship Dali that crashed Tuesday into the Francis Scott Key Bridge at the start of a voyage chartered by the shipping giant Maersk.

Stationary objects

The company could face a bevy of lawsuits from multiple directions, including from the bridge’s owner and the families of six workers who were presumed dead after a search in the Patapsco River.

Damages claims are likely to fall on the ship owner and not the agency that operates the bridge, since stationary objects aren’t typically at fault if a moving vessel hits them, said Michael Sturley, a maritime law expert at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Law.

But an 1851 law could lower the exposure to tens of millions of dollars by capping the ship owner’s liability at how much the vessel is worth after the crash, plus any earnings it collected from carrying the freight on board, said Martin Davies, the director of Tulane University’s Maritime Law Center.

The law was passed initially to prevent shipping giants from suffering steep and insurmountable losses from disasters at sea. An eight-figure sum, while still hefty, would amount to “considerably less” than the full claims total, Davies said.

‘Very unusual’

“It’s a very unusual casualty in one respect, particularly because of this footage of the whole bridge falling down,” Davies said. “But in many ways, it’s not unusual, because ships collide and there’s damage and there’s injury all the time.”

Lawrence B. Brennan, an adjunct professor of law at Fordham University School of Law in New York and an expert on admiralty and maritime law, said he assumes the Dali’s operator will shortly begin a proceeding in the U.S. under the 1851 law, which was cited by the Titanic’s owner in a Supreme Court case more than a century ago.

The ship owner’s insurance would help the company through the legal risks. About 90% of the world’s ocean-bound cargo is insured by an arm of the International Group of Protection and Indemnity Clubs, which oversees the 12 major mutual insurance associations for ship owners.