Yacht Collisions at Sea: Navigating Responsibilities

Embark on a riveting journey as Michael, a veteran maritime lawyer, sheds light on the complexities of maritime law sparked by the collision of the container ship Dali with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. The first chapter of our discussion steers through the legal presumptions and navigational rules that govern the seas, revealing how these centuries-old principles still profoundly impact the resolution of maritime incidents. Michael's narrative intertwines the threads of his professional path with America's rich seafaring past, creating a tapestry that illustrates the depth and influence of admiralty law in modern navigation and litigation.

As we sail into the murky waters of maritime terminology, Michael clarifies the distinction between 'alision' and 'collision'—terms that might sound synonymous but carry significantly different legal connotations. The conversation anchors on a real-world example, dissecting the responsibilities of a vessel's captain versus those of a state-assigned pilot, and delves into the crucial protocols that must be followed when technical issues arise onboard. Drawing parallels with historic maritime disasters, we explore the enduring question of how crews communicate critical information and the legal ramifications that follow.

The final chapter of our voyage investigates the aftermath of maritime tragedies, focusing on the role of the NTSB and the interplay between public opinion and the legal system. Through the lens of Captain John Laro's story and the heart-wrenching bridge collision he was involved with, we scrutinize the legal strategies employed and the evidentiary hurdles navigated in courtrooms. Michael's insights offer a beacon of understanding for anyone intrigued by the intricacies of maritime law and the quest for justice on the open seas. Join us for a podcast episode that promises to leave you with a newfound respect for the legal guardians of our waterways.

Have a yacht law question? Email it to info@megayachtnews.com or michael@moore-and-co.com for your chance to have it answered on our podcast. All requests for confidentiality and/or anonymity are respected.

Hiring a lawyer is a big decision. Visit Moore & Company for the legal team's qualifications and experience. And, to learn the latest about superyacht launches, shipyards, designs, and destinations, visit Megayacht News.

Transcript

Diane M. Byrne: 0:42

Welcome everybody. Michael, how are you today?

Michael Moore: 0:45

I am fine, Diane. It's a pleasure being on the Yacht Law podcast with you, as always Ready to talk about the subject of the day.

Diane M. Byrne: 0:56

Yeah, we've got an interesting topic, and pretty timely today, that's for sure Collisions at sea. So when the Key Bridge in Baltimore ended up collapsing after the container ship Dali struck it, it seemed like there were a lot of questions about the you know, who's at fault, who could be held liable, from the crew to the ship owner, to even the city itself. And it struck me that some of these very same questions might actually come up in yachting, because, from my perspective and I am admittedly not a lawyer, but it seems like the law does not differentiate from, say, a container ship versus a yacht, versus a cruise ship versus any other type of vessels when there is an accident, the vessel is a vessel is a vessel, and it did ABC and then DEF resulted. So I thought this might be an interesting opportunity for us to examine some of the big questions and some of the developments with that bridge and that ship and use it for the framework of yachting.

Michael Moore: 2:06

Absolutely and I think you got it exactly right the admiralty law which is mentioned in the Constitution, article 3,. It's fundamental and of course it's federal. Whatever state border you pass over, it does not matter, you're still under federal law, specifically admiralty law, and there are a lot of rules, regs and hundreds of years of jurisprudence that talk about maritime law. Maritime law was. I was fascinated by this aspect of the maritime heritage of the United States, particularly the whaling captains when they were the oil merchants of America. They were the oil, they controlled the oil business. Long before there was a fossil fuel oil business, there was a whaling oil business and, like the oil men of today, the oil men of the whaling era were the kings. I couldn't help but notice this when I was waiting table on Cape Cod and I thought you know, that's really amazingly cool. So all the way up to reading Moby Dick and all that became, that's how I became a maritime lawyer. But I think that you're right. The rules apply.

Michael Moore: 3:29

The Code of Federal Regulations 33 CFRs is referred to. The Chapter 33 of the Code of Federal Regulations deals with what are called the rules of the road. I've actually had a witness ask me what road and it's like well, you know, the navigation road or the navigable road. These are the rules of vessels in navigation, and you start with that when you get into things like ships hitting bridges, yachts hitting bridges. We had a case in South Florida where the vessel Rockstar hit a bridge and of course the defense was that the bridge hit the vessel, the Spanish vessel, and it was kind of an issue of fact, but that's a little bit more close to home. But I think that the federal regulations, as you work your way to the question of the March 26th collision of the container vessel Dolly, everything that went before that's called stare decisis, everything that went before decides, is the departure point for what we have today. So it's not as simple as it seems. Most people read the papers and say well, you know, let me see if I got this right. This container ship hit this bridge. They're not supposed to do that and people died, and so therefore the container ship has got to be responsible.

Michael Moore: 5:00

But there's a few things that I'd like to start off by saying. The first is that you get into what is called the. You might start with the rule of the road, so you hit something like rule two, which is like the number two. It's the poop rule. It means that when you've considered all other rules you have to consider what happened in the final moments before the collision and all those other rules kind of go out the window.

Michael Moore: 5:34

But I think in this particular case some of the traditional rules that you see, that you must maintain a lookout and must maintain a safe speed are probably not going to apply because I don't think lookout or speed seems to have had any bearing. But I think common sense would suggest that a moving object striking a stationary object normally raises a presumption of fault against the party moving. Now it might be worth mentioning that you hear the word underway. A vessel that's not alongside a berth or doesn't have anchors down or is not tied up, almost inevitably is considered to be underway. It doesn't have to be moving, but it's in the water, it's not moored, it's not anchored, so they're considered underway. So that creates a lot of confusion in the yacht world. We see that quite often where boats are sitting there drifting and they get hit by moving another boat. But the principal rule that we're dealing with here is probably going to be the so-called Pennsylvania rule, which is the rule All these cases are named after the vessels that created the rule.

Michael Moore: 6:52

So if you think about a vessel long ago called the Pennsylvania, that case created a presumption that a statutory or regulatory violation if there was a statutory or regulatory violation, like one of the rules I just mentioned, one of the CFR rules is violated, then that party has to establish. They have the burden of establishing that nothing they did caused or could have caused the collision. So it's a big burden to get over right out of the box. That's a every lawyer loves to talk about the Pennsylvania rule and there's a rule also called, very similar. It's called the Oregon rule and the Oregon rule also named after a ship called the Oregon. It's a little bit the same but there's some slightly different. It just simply doesn't get into violations of anything.

Michael Moore: 7:47

Except that there is a moving vessel. If it's at fault, it is presumed to be at fault. Now it can be rebutted, but it's presumed to be at fault if it strikes a stationary object such as a bridge. So the moving vessel this would be the dolly in this case has the burden of proving that, notwithstanding the fact that it interacted with the bridge, that otherwise it had acted with reasonable care and it was liability without fault, so you can actually get and, of course, in the dolly case, I think there's reports in the press that they had a couple of outages of electricity or power power, electrical power A lot of these engines are electrical and that's going to be a real. If they had noticed.

Michael Moore: 8:35

It has to be at the beginning of the voyage. See, this is key, this is absolutely key. You can't just have stuff happen when you're already underway and then say that vessel's unseaworthiness. Unseaworthiness is a concept that basically, in this context, requires it to be unseaworthy at the beginning of the voyage. When they left the dock, the owners and the operators were already on notice that their vessel was experiencing power outages and that creates a circumstance of unseaworthiness. And I think, in this particular case, what I read is that there were some issues with the power system that were addressed, and I think what happens is we've all done it, okay, it's repaired, and then you get underway and then it's not repaired. Right right.

Michael Moore: 9:30

They restore the power and it's not. Oh, I think I fixed it, captain. And then suddenly it's not repaired. So there's even a third vessel named Louisiana, which sounds a lot like the Pennsylvania rule and the Oregon rule, but it has more to do, it seems, with drifting vessels, vessels that lose power, like Dolly, and then collides with another anchored vessel or a navigational structure like a bridge. So all of these rules, I don't think it's important in cases like this to talk about the black letter law and the judicial law, but I think it's just the fact that, because there's a couple of other things in the Dolly case that I think are fascinating, it's going to be fascinating, one of which is the so-called Limitation of Liability Act, which is an ancient, hundred-year-old. So-called Limitation of Liability Act, which is an ancient 100-year-old. Speaking of whaling captains.

Michael Moore: 10:30

it came out of that era. It basically says, back in the day it said well, you shouldn't lose all of your wealth because of an incident, you should just lose the value of the vessel after the incident.

Diane M. Byrne: 10:44

Yeah, and before you get too far, I don't mean to interrupt you on that because there were a couple of things you just touched on, and that was one of the things I also wanted to ask you about, because these are some of the questions that have come up. Something you just mentioned before, I think is a good place to start hitting a non-moving object. The very first article I saw about the incident, the word elision, A-L-L-I-S-I-O-N was in the headline and I have to confess I thought it was a typo at first, because I was thinking collision and I saw that I thought, oh my God, that's a really embarrassing typo, Until I clicked through and I started reading the article and the word elision is all throughout the article. So I realized OK, what does Elysian mean? Thank you, Google, I looked it up.

Michael Moore: 11:27

Right.

Diane M. Byrne: 11:29

Now is that?

Michael Moore: 11:31

What was your finding? How do you define Elysian? I think I know how I would define it, but how would you define it?

Diane M. Byrne: 11:37

The brief ever so brief, because I could have gone down a rabbit hole with this. The ever so brief definition I saw was that it's a somewhat older and in some circles they consider it a lesser used maritime term where a moving vessel comes into contact with a non moving object I guess is the easiest way to say it Whereas collision involves two moving objects, in this case vessels. Are those strictly maritime definitions or are there actually legal definitions attached to them too, like in the court of law? Do you actually argue elision versus collision?

Michael Moore: 12:22

Well, I think your definition is exactly the one that's customarily accepted, and I've only heard elision used in a maritime context, because it does speak of a moving vessel striking a stationary object, whereas collision is much more broadly seen in the greater jurisprudence because that could be two cars coming together, two trucks, two boats, but it does basically talk about two things colliding. But yeah, I've never seen elision used anywhere except in the maritime context and frankly, I'm not sure it has a lot of meaning one way or the other. It just is a more precise term to emphasize that one part was moving and the other part was not. Where it gets interesting, by the way, there was a case called the Marie Landhart. In that particular case, one side alleged that the bridge was a stationary object. But the problem is it was one of those bridges that goes straight up and then people go in and then it comes back down. So there was some discussion of and I mean sometimes the spans open, like most of the ones you see two spans both opening at the same time.

Michael Moore: 13:37

So in that case, like in the Rockstar case, the allegation was that the span came down on the yacht. So you get into the question of whether the yacht should have been going trying to get through the bridge. The yacht owner was wild and crazy and over the top about that, the unfairness of it all. But you know you do get into that. But I guess that would be a collision with a moving span. I guess is my point. There's not a elision with a non-moving right, right.

Diane M. Byrne: 14:08

I was curious about that because that that first article happened to be in one of the maritime trade magazines and I went straight to that article thinking, okay, these guys are going to have the facts straight, so. And then of course I I make the wrong assumption straight away that they had a typo. So I kind of had like a good laugh at my own expense after that. But then again I walked away learning something new. So I guess it's not a bad thing, right well, no, it's.

Michael Moore: 14:34

It is a good thing, because I think the other thing that you might have seen in your reading about the Dali matter, which you don't see too much in the yacht world, is this idea of compulsory pilotage. In fact in the Dali case there was a guy at the helm on the bridge who was not the captain of the boat. It was the pilot that Maryland had assigned the Pilots Association of Maryland had assigned to be the pilot of that boat. So they go out to the boat or they go to the dock. If the boat's coming in, they go out to what is called a pilot point of the embarkation. It's always the same kind of location and the ship holds steady and then the pilot boat comes up alongside the ship and the pilot goes up on the bridge. When the bridge, when it's leaving the harbor, then the pilot goes to the dock and steps up on the bridge but takes command by law and the pilot cannot have liability. In other words, he can totally screw the pooch.

Michael Moore: 15:39

I mean, I think in the Skyway Bridge disaster, for example, the fall guy was John Lero. He was a pilot, and the fall guy in the Dolly case may become the pilot, but you don't see much yet about. Regarding the pilot, the question is what did this pilot know and when did he know it? I think that's going to be a big issue. Now. The captain always has, they say, the legal obligation to override the pilot's decision. But I think it also speaks to two people, two mariners, two highly trained professionals on board, one there because it's his ship, the other there ostensibly because it's unfamiliar waters. But the law says the pilot cannot be liable because that's basically a state employee. But the reality of it is things were happening aboard that ship and both of those men in this case could have said no, no, we've got to drop anchor and find out what's going on here.

Diane M. Byrne: 16:47

Yeah, that's certainly. That speaks to the power issues that they were experiencing. Say, there's a, the generators aren't working, the electricity on board is blinking on and off and they depart the marina. They're supposed to inform someone. It sounds like that they're experiencing these issues. It sounds like the DALI crew informed the ownership company. But who else do you have to notify by law? Do you have to notify the local port authorities, the flag that you have this catastrophic or potentially catastrophic issue going on board?

Michael Moore: 17:32

well, it reminded me of the you and I talked about in an earlier podcast, and that was when the emico cadiz lost power off the coast of of France back in the day and had a massive power failure. The ship is carrying hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil. It's one of the biggest disasters, ecological disasters in history. And they're drifting ever, ever closer to the coast of France. And what do they do? They call their ownership company, just like the Dali did. And what they were calling in the Emiko Cadiz case about was authority to sign a Lloyd's Open Forum salvage agreement.

Michael Moore: 18:21

By the time the people in Chicago were awakened and kind of cleared their head enough to have a conversation and gave authority to sign the Lloyd's Open Form. It was too late. The vessel was too. The power of the shore, the pulling the vessel there's a physics term for that, but it's a very strong, powerful but the lines parted, the lines they put on the tugboats parted. That's not a good thing when you're the tugboat operator and you're going oops, and they put up more lines and those lines also parted. So as a result, that ship went aground on the coast of France and bathed the entire coast of France, that northern part with the oil from the Amakokadis, the same with the Dali. I mean it's interesting because, okay, this is a limitation of liability act. They're going to try to limit their liability to the value of the damage caused. That was the $90 million that they're estimating, I think, for the bridge. It seems kind of low to me, but that's the number that I've seen but also to the six families that suffered the loss of their family members, the deaths of their family members, the deaths of their family members, but all of those will be put into a Limitation of Liability Act.

Michael Moore: 19:50

Now what is required of that is the ownership of the vessel has to be aware of this unseaworthy condition. There's a test, it's called privity and knowledge. So the mere fact that the captain on board was doing what he thought was the right thing to do by calling the ownership structure may be, in fact, defeating is the very nature of his call, which was to do the right thing or, at least you'd imagine, not throw his ownership under the bus. But the mere fact that the captain on board is experiencing these things does not create privity and knowledge with the owners. The owners may be, in this case, I think, in India, sitting there doing whatever they're doing.

Michael Moore: 20:52

But the call that's been made maybe gives them privity and knowledge of a situation. It depends on when the call was made. I mean, the law will assume that if the privity and knowledge call was made at the dock, then clearly the ownership and the they will not be able to limit their liability. They'll they'll have to pay the full measure of the damage. They probably have a big PNI club that covers the uh, the third party liability claims, but it's it'll be in the hundreds of millions, I'm sure.

Diane M. Byrne: 21:20

Right, that makes sense that it would be pretty high, unfortunately, if that makes sense, that it would be pretty high, unfortunately for the ownership company. But it is what it is, if that's what the law says, right, right, you know in the El Toro case, if I may say so.

Michael Moore: 21:34

You know that was the one, remember that one. That was the one where the vessel left Jacksonville and it was heading south and encountered storms and there was a lot of chatter with the ownership structure and the captains. They made mistakes and of course the ship went down and killed a number of people on board, but that would be an example of sort of operational negligence. But two things that are important is that wrongful death in the law is kind of limited in terms of damages because you have no future medicals, no future loss of income, no future pain and suffering. The person's deceased and so you have a limited recovery and what is called the Death on the High Seas Act will limit, severely limit, the recovery of these families. You should watch it because it's going to be interesting to see and it's going to be outrageous in the mind of these families. You should watch it because it's going to be interesting to see and it's going to be outrageous in the mind of most people. They're going to see the recoveries.

Michael Moore: 22:31

Now I can tell you that in the Alfaro case, when they called my office regarding the claims, the amount of money they offered was so substantial. It was so much above what we ever could legally prove in court, either because of the ignorance of their lawyers or because they just wanted to be nice, I don't know. It's not hard to—I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth but we settled those cases because the amount offered was more than we could prove in court. I thought that was a beautiful thing. I thought it was very much to the credit of the owners of that ship. Now going back to the Dolly, you know they're Indian company. They probably don't have any public concerns about. You know they're not a product that's bought by the public. It's just a freighter, a container carrier. So it'll be interesting to see how that sorts out. The lawyers will still try to do the petition for limitation of liability and they'll be at this for years, I'm guessing. It's funny when I read these articles.

Michael Moore: 23:34

They don't say who the lawyers are, which is always a little bit frustrating for me because I kind of want to know. You know who the lawyers are, but they don't mention them by name.

Diane M. Byrne: 23:41

Right, no, that's a good point. Actually, it would be helpful, I think, to multiple media and multiple lawyers to understand who's involved. And just in general, that speaks to what seems to be a little bit of confusion, or maybe even just assumption, in terms of why the ship owners filed that limitation of liability. I think that a lot of the chatter has been around the concept of filing it as a preemptive strike. Even though the vessel hadn't been declared a total loss, no assessment had been made of the vessel whatsoever. Since the ship was stuck, pinned to the bottom of the channel by the remains of the bridge Right, they filed the provision to limit the liability to the remains of the vessel and I think, even honestly, if I'm being honest, I think my initial reaction was like oh well, of course they're going to do that just to stem off any potential lawsuits from the city, from the people who were killed, et cetera. But it's not necessarily that reason why they filed it. It's maritime or admiralty law, common practice, it sounds like.

Michael Moore: 25:07

I think that the one thing that lawyers don't want to do is get caught asleep or forget about certain things. Like you have to file that petition within six months. So two months have already gone by March 26th, april 26th, say May 26th. Two months have already gone by March 26, april 26, say May 26,. Two months.

Michael Moore: 25:30

People get involved in lawsuits. They kind of forget that if you are going to petition to limit or exonerate exonerate means no exposure, zero. A limit means limiting to what is called the limitation fund. So you file the petition as a matter of course you do. That would be what that's textbook. You petition the court in federal court. That also gets you into federal court. Of course you can have lawsuits in state court under what is called a savings to suitors clause. Those six families are going to do much, much better in state court under the savings to suitors courts as a matter of course.

Michael Moore: 26:21

I should say no one can guarantee anything, even if the plaintiff's lawyers for the six families had run out and filed a lawsuit. When the petition for limitation of or exoneration from liability is filed, the federal court, which has for sure jurisdiction, will stay these state court actions. Now in some cases they look at them and say well, you know, we have six families similarly situated. Clearly we can agree, they have no fault, they're not liable in any way, they're victims. So we're not talking about liability, we're talking about damages.

Michael Moore: 27:21

What is it? And then we're talking about the I mentioned earlier. It would be good for the lawyers to know who the lawyers are, because to me it would be one of the stories, the big stories would be. You know why so little? I mean, that's basically my belief. I think that some of these most horrible deaths, but the death of the High Seas Act, was passed by a bunch of vested interests, like all laws are passed and uh they, it just severely limits the recovery of the litigants. But I think that step number one for sure, for sure is that the law firms elected. There's a lot of great maritime law firms in the Chesapeake Bay area that that would be textbook. You'd be criticized if you didn't file that petition. Even if it's denied, you're still going to file it.

Diane M. Byrne: 28:10

So, like you were saying before, with some of those laws the Pennsylvania, the Oregon, et cetera conceivably, if they do challenge this limitation and the court agrees with them, then there could be the Dali law that extends the. Yeah.

Michael Moore: 28:30

I mean a judge looking at the case. The judge is sorry to slice. This just simply means my departure point. This is something I think this is a very good. This is a general view. Maybe for lawyers, if any of them care to tap into these podcasts, since it is a legal podcast of them, care to tap into these podcasts, since it is a legal podcast, the. I find that young lawyers forget that there was a lawyer back in the day that handled the louisiana case and there was a lawyer that handled the pennsylvania case and there was a lawyer that handled all of these different the oregon case, which became known as the oregon, the Pennsylvania rule and Louisiana rule but somebody, the stare decisis is your departure point.

Michael Moore: 29:15

So the Dolly case is interesting in that someone is really going to have to master the three leading cases on moving vessels and presumption of fault and rebuttable presumptions of fault in the context of this case, because I think that the problem that I have with it honestly is I'm on the bridge and I'm way the hell up there, okay, and I got an engine room department. I got a bunch of guys in there, girls and guys perhaps that are authorities on what happens in that engine room. They have nothing to do with the bridge, they have nothing to do with navigation, they have nothing to do with the galley or the mess or all the other departments of a ship. It's a big floating hotel, so to speak. And the guy in the bridge says we took care of it, captain, no problems, okay. So he says, oh okay, that's great, let's keep moving. Now, everyone's now going to be a historian with 20-20 hindsight. But what do you do when you're on the bridge? And this is where the reasonable person standard comes into play. The judge is going to have to look on the bridge. And this is where the reasonable person standard comes into play. The judge is going to have to look at the circumstances, all of them, and also with the force of public opinion. You know, people want blood, they want redress, they want justice, they want fairness. But yeah, it's going to be much more complicated.

Michael Moore: 30:45

They had two failures. What is the amount of time for the two failures? When did the first failure occur? What did the crew say? Solved the problem. You know, you got an engineer down there. Chief engineer, he's not much of a second engineer. You know, chief, we took care of this problem. We found what the problem was. The breaker was thrown. Okay, so you flip the breaker back. Yeah, now we got power again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, let's go.

Michael Moore: 31:16

So you're off to the races. You're starting to move toward the bridge, the stationary bridge, the Francis Scott Key Bridge, and, my God, I mean clear night. I mean the Sunshine Causeway Bridge. The Sunshine State Causeway Bridge was 80 mile an hour gust. So John Laro became a scapegoat because, dude, it's Hurricane 72. You were experiencing 80-mile-an-hour gusts. You know that. You have to just remember that ship's going to get blown off. Course, it's a big sail. It was in light condition, there was no cargo on board. So John Lrow became the scapegoat because, yeah, he made the decision to continue, hit the bridge, the span falls and, next thing, you know, buses, cars and trucks are going into the waters of tampa bay.

Michael Moore: 32:20

But I don't know, I always find it interesting because, you know, most people kind of default to the bottom line. But it's just, all of these, all of these cases are morality tales. You know, it's it's America at its best trying to get to the right decision. Yeah, and it's just cool. I mean, I find it just fascinating because, you know, I mean I wish I had time to really spend a lot of time on it. But you know there may be a book, may be written about it and it will. Lot of time on it. But you know there may be a book, may be written about it, and it will, and of course a case will be rendered and maybe it will call the.

Diane M. Byrne: 32:50

Dolly case going forward as you suggested? Yeah, that would be interesting to see.

Diane M. Byrne: 32:57

One last question We've got maybe about two or three minutes left. Here in the United States we've got the National Transportation Safety Board, which does a thorough investigation into these types of accidents, collecting eyewitness accounts, collecting CCTV footage, everything and anything that they can to examine what actually happened and piece together the timeline. Do any potential lawsuits need to wait until after the NTSB issues a completed report, whether it's this situation with the DALI or it's a situation with a yacht? Because again, like you said earlier, the lawsuits will take quite some time to settle, will take quite some time to settle. So would they be obligated to wait until the final report is released? Because what I'm thinking is that in the case of a yacht in particular and I would imagine also the Dali.

Diane M. Byrne: 33:55

when there's CCTV footage that belongs to the yacht or to the vessel, I should say so the defense, or prosecution as the case may be could use that footage in the court of law without needing to wait for the NTSB report.

Michael Moore: 34:09

A couple of points there and I think it's shocking, if not just surprising, to people. These reports that are prepared by these governmental agencies like the National Transportation Safety Board are not admissible in court. They are considered to be a hearsay, their statements are offered out of court, they cannot be entered in court to prove the truth of the matter asserted, and it's a good rule, because the people out there doing their best to investigate are under extreme time pressures to get an investigation done, finished, finalized, and they've proven over time to be often wrong Most of the time. I guess most of the time right, but often wrong. Maybe that what they're looking for is something that is more protective of the public than trying to find fault or liability on the part of the plaintiff I mean, on the part of the defendant. They have no concerns with the plaintiff, the fact that they certainly are aware and concerned that six people died and they have to think in terms of do we need a better system for informing the workers on board the bridge, because that's what happened here, of course. Informing the workers on board the bridge, because that's what happened here, of course. I mean I think that the pilot did a pretty damn good job of clearing the bridge, to the extent that he was in communication with the people operating the bridge. The bridge is down, the span is out, stop the traffic. Now you know we have trouble and all of that happened and all of those people who died were, as you know, working on the bridge. They were workers. So I think right away you're going to see something that says you know, anytime you're on board working on a bridge, you must have a means of communication with the bridge tender that says get off the bridge. Now you know vessel has lost steerage and that's, that's all on record. That's all recorded. You'll hear this a thousand times. You hear the the costa concordia chatino, get back on that ship. You know it was. It's like recording the all these things.

Michael Moore: 36:31

Now, with respect to ct, the problem there is all these things have to be authenticated. All these things have to be authenticated. So I don't know, honestly, off the top of my head, how do you authenticate a CCTV video? But normally, when you're authenticating all those wonderful little films that we've seen on the Internet, the question is who took it? Who had personal knowledge? They were standing behind the lens filming. Who has personal knowledge? That hasn't been doctored in any way hasn't been. Footage hasn't been removed. You know, in other words, everything about it. It's the authenticity of the film. So all those wonderful videos that we're seeing, I think all of those films will have to be authenticated for them to come into evidence.

Michael Moore: 37:23

But I think the principal point there is the NTS kind of deals only with liability. They don't really do so much with damages per se. It might find its way into their report but none of that is proven. It's just kind of hearsay. What they've been told it's a $90 million situation and they certainly don't have anything to do with collectability after you prove liability on the part of a defendant. But all of those things will come out in the lawsuit. But the NTSB, those reports are generally just not. They just rarely find their way into evidence. They're just not. They've just been found routinely to be unreliable.

Diane M. Byrne: 38:05

That's pretty eye-opening. This whole conversation has been eye-opening. I've been jotting some notes, as usual, while you've been talking. It's fascinating, absolutely fascinating. We could probably go on for another hour and maybe even do a second episode. I'm sure there'll be some good follow-up questions from some people. Absolutely fascinating. We could probably go on for another hour and maybe even do a second episode. I'm sure there'll be some good follow-up questions from some people and maybe we can bring in some of the lawyers from the Skyway Bridge or incident just to shed some light in a future podcast. So, michael, as always, thank you for your time and for your insight. This has been quite a good discussion.

Michael Moore: 38:36

It's been my pleasure, as always, signing off and I hope everyone will come to our next podcast and we'll try to do a good job for everyone.

Diane M. Byrne: 38:47

Definitely Everybody. Thank you for listening. If you have a Yacht Law question that you would like us to address on a future episode, you can reach out to Michael or to me. Our contact information is in the show notes for this episode and all of our episodes. As usual, Our goal is to help you make better, educated decisions, whether you are a yacht owner, a crew member, a representative in the industry or someone who is just wanting to learn more about the world of yachting. And, of course, we can keep you anonymous if you so wish. Until next time. I'm Diane Byrne.

Michael Moore: 39:23

And Michael Moore saying goodbye.