Owner of Ship that Slammed Bridge Denies Responsibility

In the hours after a massive container ship destroyed Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge early Tuesday morning, the small cadre of lawyers who specialize in maritime issues began ramping up for what is expected to be a lengthy, complicated legal fight.

A lot is at stake: The vessel, a Singapore-flagged cargo ship called the Dali, is believed to have suffered a power failure before it smashed into a support column and sent a 1,200-foot stretch of the bridge’s span tumbling into the Patapsco River, leaving six members of a construction crew presumed dead and snarling shipping out of a major port.

The ship’s owner could face millions of dollars in claims stemming from the disaster. But it may be possible for the owner — or a group of entities with ownership interest — to limit their liability, maritime lawyers told The Daily Record.

The Dali is owned by the Singaporean company Grace Ocean Private Ltd.

Lawyers said the legal team representing the ship’s owner is likely to file a “limitation of liability” action, a mechanism that dates back to 1851 and was invoked after the Titanic sunk in 1912. If successful, the action could limit the vessel owner’s liability to the value of the Dali and its “pending freight.”

At minimum, though, the owner will have to put up a fund of at least $420 per ton, or nearly $40 million, because this case involves personal injury and death claims. Six construction workers who were on the bridge when it collapsed are presumed dead, and two other workers survived the crash. Members of the ship’s crew were reported safe after the crash.

“If there’s not enough money to pay injured or killed individuals, a special fund would be set up to pay them,” said Paul D. Bekman, of Bekman, Marder, Hopper, Malarkey & Perlin LLC.

Once the limitation of liability action is filed, all pending litigation against the ship would be halted and the case would be brought into federal court, where maritime legal issues are handled. People who wish to make claims against the ship would have a set period of time to do so.

The claimants will likely also try to prove that the ship’s owner had “privity or knowledge” of the cause of the accident. If that’s proven, a federal judge could “break” the limitation of liability, allowing claimants to win damages that exceed the value of the ship and its pending freight.

In the case of the Dali, that will mean investigating what caused the power failure on the ship, a question that is also being probed by the National Transportation Safety Board.

“If we assume this was a loss of power that caused the accident, they would look into such things as the maintenance records and whether they had an understanding of a propulsion issue,” said Alexander Giles, a maritime lawyer and partner at Tydings & Rosenberg LLP.

If the limitation of liability is not broken, the damages paid by the ship owner almost certainly will not cover the cost of replacing the Key Bridge or paying out other major claims.