Cookingham v. United States, 10142.
| Decision Date | 20 September 1950 |
| Docket Number | No. 10142.,10142. |
| Citation | 184 F.2d 213 |
| Parties | COOKINGHAM v. UNITED STATES. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Third Circuit |
Abraham E. Freedman, Philadelphia, Pa. (William M. Alper and Freedman, Landy & Lorry, all of Philadelphia, Pa., on the brief), for appellant.
Thomas E. Byrne, Jr., Philadelphia, Pa. (Gerald A. Gleeson, United States Attorney, John A. Friedrich and Krusen, Evans & Shaw, all of Philadelphia, Pa., on the brief), for appellee.
Before BIGGS, Chief Judge, and MARIS and KALODNER, Circuit Judges.
The basic question which this case raises is whether the failure of the shipowner to provide a safe place to work affords to an injured seaman an independent ground for the recovery of damages without proof of negligence or unseaworthiness. It appears that the libellant, a cook on the Rufus W. Peckham, slipped on a substance, apparently Jello, while going down a stairway leading to the chill box to get food for the crew. For injuries to his knee thus sustained he brought this suit. There was no evidence as to when or how the substance got on the step. The district court held that the evidence failed to establish negligence and also that it did not show that the owner had failed to maintain the ship in a seaworthy condition. Concluding that there was no basis for holding that the respondent was liable to the libellant for damages merely because of the temporarily unsafe condition of the stairway in question, the court entered judgment for the respondent on the libellant's claim for damages. 87 F.Supp. 203.
We think that the district court was right in holding that in the absence of evidence of negligence or unseaworthiness the respondent was not liable for failing to provide a safe place to work. "If," as Chief Judge Kirkpatrick said in his opinion, 87 F.Supp. 203, 205, "the place where a seaman works is unsafe that is a fact which may establish that the ship was unseaworthy or that the employees were negligent, but" there is "no basis for holding that there is a third and separate ground of liability in this regard." In the present case the district court concluded that the evidence failed to establish negligence. There being no evidence as to how long a time the Jello had been on the step prior to the accident, a finding that the ship's officers were negligent in failing to remove it after they knew or should have known of its existence would, we think, not have been warranted.
Nor can we say that the district court erred in concluding that unseaworthiness had not been proved. Undoubtedly the owner has a duty at the commencement of the voyage to furnish a vessel and appliances which are seaworthy in all respects. It is equally settled that he has a continuing duty to keep the vessel's appliances in order and to maintain the vessel itself in a seaworthy condition during the voyage. His liability for failure to perform these duties is a species of liability without fault not limited by conceptions of negligence. Seas Shipping Co. v. Sieracki, 1946, 328 U.S. 85, 66 S.Ct. 872, 90 L.Ed. 1099.
We agree with the district court, however, that the doctrine of unseaworthiness does not extend so far as to require the owner to keep appliances which are inherently sound and seaworthy absolutely free at all times from transitory unsafe conditions resulting from their use, as happened in the case before us. Mahnich v. Southern S.S. Co., 1944, 321 U.S. 96, 66 S.Ct. 455, 88 L.Ed. 561, is urged to the contrary. But that case is clearly distinguishable. There the seaman was injured by a fall from a staging which gave way when a defective rope supporting it parted. The rope, an essential part of the ship's gear, was itself inherently defective and, therefore, unseaworthy.
In the present case the stairway upon which the libellant slipped was perfectly sound, its unsafe condition being the sole result of the temporary presence of a foreign substance upon it. To extend the doctrine of unseaworthiness to cover such a case as this would be to make the ship owner an insurer against every fortuitous or negligent act on shipboard which results in temporarily rendering an appliance less than safe even though he may have no knowledge of or control over its happening, and without giving him a reasonable opportunity, such as is afforded by the safe place to work doctrine of the law of negligence, to correct the condition before he becomes liable for it. The ancient admiralty doctrine of unseaworthiness has never gone so far. If, as the litigation coming before us would indicate, the doctrines of unseaworthiness and negligence fall far short of giving seamen adequate protection by way of compensation for all injuries suffered by them in the maritime service the remedy is not for the court to extend the old rules to cases such as this which they were never designed to cover but rather for Congress to supplement or supersede the ancient rules with a modern seamen's compensation act.
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...in the vessel and the cause of harm, in which it was held that there was no breach of the warranty of seaworthiness. Cookingham v. United States, 3 Cir., 184 F.2d 213, certiorari denied 340 U.S. 935, 71 S.Ct. 495, 95 L.Ed. 675; Adamowski v. Gulf Oil Corp., D.C., 93 F.Supp. 115, affirmed 3 C......
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