Hollingsworth v. Anderson-Tully Co.

940 F. Supp. 967, 1996 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15598, 1996 WL 604316
CourtDistrict Court, N.D. Mississippi
DecidedOctober 16, 1996
Docket4:95CV248-S-B
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 940 F. Supp. 967 (Hollingsworth v. Anderson-Tully Co.) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, N.D. Mississippi primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Hollingsworth v. Anderson-Tully Co., 940 F. Supp. 967, 1996 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15598, 1996 WL 604316 (N.D. Miss. 1996).

Opinion

OPINION

SENTER, Chief Judge.

In this admiralty ease, plaintiffs, Bobby Dell and Tillie Hollingsworth, seek relief under the Jones Act and general maritime law or, alternatively, under the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act for personal injuries Mr. Hollingsworth received while attempting to untangle the cables of a crane. Presently before the court is defendant’s motion for summary judgment.

FACTS

Bobby Dell Hollingsworth began working for the defendant, Anderson-Tully Company, in July, 1994. Anderson-Tully is in the business of logging and processing hard wood timber which is cut along the banks of the Mississippi River and other navigable streams. After a brief training period, Holl *969 ingsworth was assigned to Derrick Boat 17, a floating river barge, which was equipped with living quarters; a Prentiss loader, which functioned as a crane; and other mechanical devices that were used in Anderson-Tully’s logging operations. Derrick Boat 17 was customarily moved by inland river towboats to locations on the shore of the Mississippi River adjacent to where logging operations were then being conducted. Hollingsworth’s duties with Anderson-Tully included driving a front-end loader and moving logs to the edge of the riverbank. The operator of the Prentiss loader would then pick up the logs and place them onto a river barge secured to the outside of Derrick Boat 17.

On October 15, 1994, Derrick Boat 17 was moved ten miles from its location on Ash-brook Island to Lake Ferguson because a loaded log barge had sunk. The plan was to use Derrick Boat 17 to pick up the floating logs and reload them onto an empty barge. The next morning, someone discovered that the cables on the boom of the Prentiss loader were fouled, preventing the boom from fully extending down to the edge of the water and extracting the logs. In an attempt to disentangle the cables and return them to their proper positions, Hollingsworth climbed out onto the boom; however, the grapple on the end of the boom fell, and a buckle through which the cables ran moved, striking Hollingsworth in the mouth and slamming the back of his head against the boom. As a result of his injuries, Hollingsworth underwent extensive plastic, dental, and skull surgery and the replacement of his six upper front teeth.

DISCUSSION

I.

In his first claim for relief, Hollingsworth contends that he is a seaman and therefore entitled to protection under the Jones Act, 46 App.U.S.C. § 688. Anderson-Tully disputes that contention and requests summary dismissal of any claims arising under the Jones Act or general maritime law, arguing that Hollingsworth was a longshoreman who performed only minimal seaman tasks while assigned to Derrick Boat 17.

The “essential requirements for seaman status are twofold.” Chandris, Inc. v. Latsis, — U.S. —, —, 115 S.Ct. 2172, 2189, 132 L.Ed.2d 314, 337 (1995). First, the employee’s duties must contribute to the function of the vessel or to the accomplishment of its mission. Chandris, — U.S. at —, 115 S.Ct. at 2189, 132 L.Ed.2d at 337. Second, “a seaman must have a connection to a vessel in navigation ... that is substantial in terms of both its duration and its nature.” Id.

The fundamental purpose of this substantial connection requirement is to give full effect to the remedial scheme created by Congress and to separate the sea-based maritime employees who are entitled to Jones Act protections from those land-based workers who have only a transitory or sporadic connection to a vessel in navigation, and therefore whose employment does not regularly expose them to the perils of the sea.

Id.

In determining whether an employee meets the substantial connection factor, the court must look to the totality of the circumstances of the individual’s employment, as the “duration of a worker’s connection to a vessel and the nature of the worker’s activities, taken together determine whether a maritime employee is a seaman....” Id. at —, at 2190, at 338. Although “seaman status is not merely a temporal concept ... it necessarily includes a temporal element.” Id. at —, at 2191, at 339. Indeed, “[a] maritime worker who spends only a small fraction of his working time on board a vessel is fundamentally land-based and therefore not a member of the vessel’s crew, regardless of what his duties are.” Id. From that premise, the general rule has evolved that a maritime worker who spends less than 30 percent of his time in service of the vessel does not qualify as a Jones Act seaman. Id.

In this case, Anderson-Tully is willing, for purposes of this motion only, to concede the first element of the Chandris test, i.e., that Hollingsworth contributed to the function of Derrick Boat 17 as a vessel *970 and to the accomplishment of its mission. It directs the court’s attention instead to the second prong of the Chandris test, arguing that Hollingsworth’s connection to Derrick Boat 17 was not substantial either in terms of its duration or its nature. In support of its position, Anderson-Tully analyzed the tasks that Hollingsworth performed aboard Derrick Boat 17, which included filling the water tank, cheeking the oil in the generator and the fuel in the diesel tank, washing the deck, and moving barges (as opposed to his “principal” job which was operating a forklift) and estimated the time necessary to complete these tasks based on the accepted and undisputed calculations of Hollingsworth and his co-workers. This exercise resulted in an estimation that Hollingsworth spent no more than 10 percent of his time performing traditional seaman tasks aboard Derrick Boat 17. In response, Hollingsworth, citing a plethora of pre-Chandris cases, argues not that the estimation is mathematically inaccurate but that it is an improper division of his time in light of the fact that all of his duties “were 100% in contribution to the function of this special purpose vessel and completion of its logging mission” and that it overlooks time spent by Hollingsworth operating the skiff, painting Derrick Boat 17, helping the towboats make tow, and watching and pumping barges while at one of the logging sites. He offers no evidence of the time spent performing these other tasks.

The court does not take issue with Hollingsworth’s contention that everything he did aided Derrick . Boat 17 in the accomplishment of its goals; however, that is a separate consideration from the second prong of the Chandris test, which this court believes is dispositive of the question of Hollingsworth’s seaman status. Indeed, in this court’s view, Chandris mandates the type of task analysis that Anderson-Tully has suggested in this case. When the court considers “the small fraction of [Hollingsworth’s] working time [that was spent] on board” Derrick Boat 17, id. at —, at 2191, at 389, in light of the totality of the circumstances of his employment, it becomes clear that Hollingsworth was “simply a land-based employee who happen[ed] to be working on the vessel” at the time of his injury. Id. at —, at 2190, at 338. Under Chandris,

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Bluebook (online)
940 F. Supp. 967, 1996 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 15598, 1996 WL 604316, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/hollingsworth-v-anderson-tully-co-msnd-1996.