Hurt Working on a Boat, Barge, or Offshore Rig?
You probably have more rights than your company is telling you, and a real deadline to use them.
You went to work on a tugboat, a crew boat, a barge, a dredge, an offshore supply vessel, or a drilling rig. Something on deck or in the rigging gave way: a line, a winch, a ladder, a hatch, a cable, or footing that should not have been wet, oiled, or unguarded. Maybe you reported it on the spot. Maybe you tried to work through it and the pain is worse now than it was a week ago.
Now the calls have started. The company safety guy. The claims adjuster. A nurse case manager you’ve never met. Someone wants you to sign forms. Someone else wants a recorded statement. A company doctor says you’re fine, even though you are clearly not.
Stop signing things. Stop giving statements.
If your job involved working on a vessel (not a fixed platform, but a vessel that moves on the water), the rules that apply to you are not the rules of a normal job site. A federal law called the Jones Act, along with a body of maritime law that has been around since this country was founded, gives injured boat and offshore workers rights and remedies that a Texas or California workers’ comp claim does not.
Raven Injury Law represents injured maritime workers across Texas, the Gulf Coast, and Southern California. Our founder, Charles “Raven” Vethan, is one of fewer than 1% of Texas attorneys who are dual Board Certified by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization, in both Civil Trial Law and Consumer & Commercial Law. We don’t process claims. We try cases.
Practice Areas
Contact us today for a free consultation and find out how we can help.
(281) 500-1000
Who This Page Is For
If any of this sounds like you or someone in your family, keep reading.
Tugboat, towboat & barge crew
Deckhands, mates, captains, engineers, tankermen, and relief crew on tugboats, towboats, push-boats, and barges.
Offshore supply & crew boats
Crew on offshore supply vessels (OSVs), crew boats, fast supply vessels, and anchor handlers running out of Texas and Southern California ports.
Dredge workers
Crew on dredges, dredging tenders, hopper barges, and other dredging equipment.
Commercial fishing crew
Shrimp, longline, finfish, and other commercial fishing crews.
Drillships & mobile rigs
Workers permanently assigned to a drillship, semi-submersible, jack-up rig, or other mobile offshore drilling unit (MODU).
Vessel maintenance & repair
Mechanical, welding, and repair crews living and working aboard while a vessel is in service.
Loading, unloading & mooring
Workers hurt loading, unloading, mooring, or working on or near a vessel in a Texas or Southern California port.
Not sure your job counts?
It probably does. The defense lawyers will spend serious money arguing it doesn’t. We will spend the same energy showing it does.
The Kinds of Injuries We Handle
Working on the water creates injuries that land jobs do not. Vessel motion, weather, heavy machinery in tight spaces, bad lighting, slick decks, fatigue, and undermanned watches all stack against you. The injuries we see most often:
Back & neck injuries
Herniated and bulging discs and cervical injuries from lifting, slipping, falling, or being thrown by vessel motion.
Shoulder tears
Rotator cuff, labrum, and AC joint injuries, often from line-handling, mooring, or overhead lifts.
Knee, hip & ankle injuries
From falls, deck conditions, or ladder failures.
Crush injuries
From cargo, hatches, doors, lines, winches, or shifting equipment.
Hand, finger & wrist injuries
Amputations, fractures, ligament tears, and degloving.
Head & brain injuries (TBI)
From falls, line snap-back, or being struck by equipment.
Burns & chemical exposure
Engine room incidents, hot work, fuel fires, electrical contact, and chemical or toxic exposure.
Spinal cord injuries & paralysis
Injuries that can change how you work and live for the rest of your life.
Drowning & near-drowning
Man-overboard events and other water emergencies on and around vessels.
Repetitive trauma
Carpal tunnel and cumulative back and shoulder damage from years of crew work.
Hearing loss
From prolonged engine room and machinery exposure.
Psychological trauma
After fires, sinkings, man-overboard events, or witnessing a crewmate’s serious injury or death.
How These Injuries Happen, and Why It Matters
Your case is not just about the fact that you got hurt. It is about what was wrong on that boat that day, and what should have been done differently.
An employer doesn’t have to make a vessel perfectly safe. But the law requires the employer to use reasonable care to provide a reasonably safe place to work, and it requires the vessel itself to be reasonably fit for its purpose. When either of those duties is broken and someone gets hurt, that is your case.
Slick decks
Oil, grease, fish slime, hydraulic fluid, or water with no nonskid coating, and missing deck rails.
Equipment that should have been pulled
Frayed lines, broken winches, defective ladders, cracked welds, worn rigging, and missing guards.
Undermanned crews
A two-person job assigned to one person to keep payroll down.
No real training
A green hand sent into a dangerous task without a JSA, a safety briefing, or meaningful supervision.
Unsafe orders
Being told to do something a reasonable mariner would refuse to do, or to do it in worse weather than the job warrants.
Bad lighting
Passageways, docks, engine rooms, or work areas where you can’t see what you’re stepping on.
Delayed medical evacuation
“Wait it out,” “finish the hitch,” or “we’ll get you to a doctor at the next port” when the injury needed an ambulance.
An unfit vessel
Too old, too poorly maintained, missing safety equipment, or missing crew.
What You Can Recover
Workers’ comp in Texas or California pays a narrow list of things at modest rates. A maritime injury claim, when it applies, can be much broader. Depending on your case, you may be able to recover:
A narrow list at modest rates
- Medical benefits through the comp system
- Partial wage replacement, capped by the state
- No damages for pain and suffering
- No damages for mental anguish
Can be much broader
- All medical bills, past and future
- All lost wages, past and future
- Lost earning capacity: the difference between what you could earn before and what you can earn now
- Pain and suffering
- Mental anguish
- Physical impairment and disfigurement
- Maintenance: daily living expenses while you recover
- Cure: medical care until maximum medical improvement
- Extra damages, including attorney’s fees and, in extreme cases, punitive damages, when an employer wrongly cuts off maintenance and cure
- Wrongful death damages if a family member died on the water
The Daily Pay and Medical Care Your Employer Owes You, Lawsuit or No Lawsuit
Maritime law has a feature ordinary workers’ comp does not. Even before any lawsuit, the moment a vessel-based worker is hurt or falls ill in the service of the vessel, the employer has to start paying two things automatically:
Maintenance
A daily living allowance to cover food and housing while you recover ashore.
Cure
Reasonable medical care until a real doctor (not just a company doctor) says you have reached “maximum medical improvement,” meaning you are as healed as you are going to get.
- Owed regardless of whose fault the injury was
- You do not have to sue to get them
- Your employer cannot contract the duty away
The catch
Many maritime employers pay maintenance at absurdly low daily rates, sometimes $25 or $30 a day, which would not have covered groceries in 1985. Many also use company-selected doctors who are quick to declare maximum medical improvement so they can stop paying for treatment. If your employer is paying you a token rate, refusing to pay at all, or cutting off your medical care before you have actually healed, you may be entitled to additional damages, including in some cases attorney’s fees and punitive damages.
When the Boat or the Equipment Was the Problem
Beyond a negligence claim against your employer, you may also have a separate claim against the owner of the vessel, even if the owner is a different company. Maritime law requires the vessel itself to be reasonably fit for its purpose. When it isn’t, the law calls the vessel “unseaworthy.”
The standard against the vessel owner is strict. You don’t have to prove negligence. You have to prove the boat or its gear was not reasonably fit, and that the unfitness caused your injury.
A vessel can be unseaworthy when:
- The boat is undermanned
- The gear is defective
- The procedures are unsafe
- The equipment is not what it should be
Who owns the boat matters
Sometimes the employer and the vessel owner are the same company. Sometimes they aren’t: you might be employed by a manning agency while the boat is owned by an operator and chartered by yet a third company. That layered ownership is exactly where many cases produce real recovery, and exactly where firms that don’t know maritime law leave money on the table.
Maritime injury claims under the Jones Act and general maritime law generally must be filed within three years of the date of injury, under federal law (46 U.S.C. § 30106).
That is different from the two-year deadline for most ordinary personal injury cases in Texas and California. The federal three-year deadline controls when your case arises out of a maritime injury.
The Deadline: You Generally Have Three Years
Three years sounds like a long time. It is not. Vessel logs are overwritten. Voyage data recorder (VDR) and electronic chart data are purged on rolling cycles. Crewmates transfer to other companies, other vessels, sometimes other countries. Maintenance records and JSAs disappear into shoreside file rooms. The earlier we are involved, the more evidence we can lock down, and the more leverage you have when it comes time to negotiate or try the case.
Shorter deadlines apply in some situations
Vessels owned or operated by the United States
Claims involving a vessel owned or operated by the United States (for example, MSC vessels or U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredges) generally have a two-year deadline, plus a written-claim presentment requirement that can effectively shorten the window further.
Cruise passenger ticket contracts
Some passenger ticket contracts shorten the deadline to one year for cruise passengers. This does not generally apply to crew.
Wrongful death at sea
Wrongful death cases at sea also follow the three-year window, but the analysis differs depending on whether the death occurred in territorial waters or on the high seas.
What to Do Now
In the first hours and days after a vessel injury, the things that help most are not legal. They are practical. Do everything you reasonably can to preserve:
The vessel and company
The vessel name and the operating company.
Every witness
Names and contact information for everyone on board, especially the captain, mate, and any crewmate who saw what happened.
Reports and statements
Copies of any incident report or statement you signed. Refuse to sign anything you have not had a chance to read carefully.
Photos and video
The spot where you were hurt, the equipment involved, and your injuries.
Company messages
Texts, emails, and voicemails, especially anything telling you to wait on medical care, come back early, or say something specific in a statement.
Medical records
Onboard medical, evacuation, ER, and follow-up care.
Pay and crew records
Pay stubs, timesheets, and crew rosters proving where you were assigned and how much time you spent on or in service of vessels.
Maintenance and cure letters
Any letter, email, or text about maintenance and cure, especially anything cutting it off or reducing it.
Don’t give a recorded statement to the company adjuster without a lawyer.
Maritime employers and their insurance carriers (often a Protection & Indemnity “P&I” club) send claims professionals to the scene within hours, sometimes before you are even discharged from the hospital. They are friendly. They sound concerned. They are not on your side. Anything you say will be selectively quoted later to argue you were at fault, that the injury was preexisting, or that the boat and the gear were perfectly fine. You are not legally required to give a recorded statement to your employer’s insurer. Politely refuse, and call us.
Why Raven Injury Law
Founder Charles M.R. “Raven” Vethan is dual Board Certified by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization in Civil Trial Law and Consumer & Commercial Law, a credential held by fewer than 1% of Texas attorneys.
Cases tried to verdict or final award by our founder.
Years of trial experience.
Licensed in both Texas and California.
We know the inside of a vessel
We take on tugboat and towboat companies, barge fleets, OSV operators, drilling contractors, vessel charterers, and the P&I clubs that insure them. They are not used to a firm that knows the inside of a vessel as well as the inside of a courtroom.
No fee unless we recover
Contingency representation. You pay no attorney’s fees unless we recover for you.
Available day or night
Maritime injuries don’t keep business hours. Neither do we.
Serving Injured Maritime Workers in Texas and Southern California
Raven Injury Law represents injured maritime workers throughout the Texas Gulf Coast and Southern California, and on vessels that work out of Texas and California ports anywhere in the world.
Texas ports & cities
- Houston
- Galveston
- Texas City
- Pasadena
- Freeport
- Beaumont
- Port Arthur
- Sabine Pass
- Corpus Christi
- Brownsville
Southern California ports & cities
- Port of Long Beach
- Port of Los Angeles
- San Pedro
- Wilmington
- Orange County
- San Diego
Gulf waterways & offshore
- Houston Ship Channel
- Sabine-Neches Waterway
- Galveston Bay
- Gulf Intracoastal Waterway
- Outer Continental Shelf
Hurt Working on a Boat, Barge, or Offshore Rig?
You went to work on a tugboat. A crew boat. A barge. A dredge. An offshore supply vessel or a drilling rig. Something on the deck or in the rigging gave way — a line, a winch, a ladder, a hatch, a cable, a piece of footing that should not have been wet, oiled, or unguarded. You got hurt. Maybe you reported it on the spot. Maybe you tried to work through it and now the pain is worse than it was a week ago.
Now the calls have started. The company safety guy. The claims adjuster. A nurse case manager you’ve never met. Somebody handed you forms to sign. Somebody else is asking for a recorded statement. A company doctor is telling you you’re fine, even though you are very clearly not fine.
Stop signing things. Stop giving statements. If your job involved working on a vessel — not a fixed platform, but a vessel that moves on the water — the rules that apply to you are not the rules that apply to a normal job site. There is a federal law called the Jones Act, and along with it a body of maritime law that has been around since this country was founded, that gives injured boat and offshore workers rights and remedies that a Texas workers’ comp claim does not.
Raven Injury Law represents injured maritime workers across Texas and the Gulf Coast. Our founder, Charles “Raven” Vethan, is one of fewer than 1% of Texas attorneys who are dual Board Certified by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization in both Civil Trial Law and Consumer & Commercial Law. We don’t process claims. We try cases.
Who This Page Is For
If any of this sounds like you or someone in your family, keep reading:
- You're a deckhand, mate, captain, engineer, tankerman, or relief crew on a tugboat, towboat, push-boat, or barge.
- You work on an offshore supply vessel (OSV), crew boat, fast supply vessel, or anchor handler running out of a Texas port.
- You work on a dredge, dredging tender, hopper barge, or other dredging equipment.
- You're commercial fishing crew — shrimp, longline, finfish, or otherwise.
- You're permanently assigned to a drillship, semi-submersible, jack-up rig, or other mobile offshore drilling unit (MODU).
- You handle vessel-based maintenance, mechanical, welding, or repair work — living and working aboard while a vessel is in service.
- You were hurt loading, unloading, mooring, or working on or near a vessel in a Texas port.
If you’re not sure whether your job counts — it probably does. The defense lawyers will spend serious money trying to argue it doesn’t. We will spend the same energy showing it does.
Practice Areas
Contact us today for a free consultation and find out how we can help.
(281) 500-1000
The Kinds of Injuries We Handle
Working on the water creates a category of injuries that land jobs do not. Vessel motion, weather, heavy machinery in tight spaces, bad lighting, slick decks, fatigue, undermanned watches — all of it stacks against you. The injuries we see most often include:
- Back injuries — herniated and bulging discs from lifting, slipping, falling, or being thrown by vessel motion
- Neck and cervical injuries
- Shoulder tears — rotator cuff, labrum, AC joint, often from line-handling, mooring, or overhead lifts
- Knee, hip, and ankle injuries from falls, deck conditions, or ladder failures
- Crush injuries from cargo, hatches, doors, lines, winches, or shifting equipment
- Hand, finger, and wrist injuries — amputations, fractures, ligament tears, degloving
- Head injuries and traumatic brain injuries (TBI) from falls, line snap-back, or struck-by events
- Burns from engine room incidents, hot work, fuel fires, electrical contact, or chemical exposure
- Spinal cord injuries and paralysis
- Drownings and near-drownings
- Chemical and toxic exposure injuries
- Repetitive trauma injuries (carpal tunnel, cumulative back and shoulder damage from years of crew work)
- Hearing loss from prolonged engine room and machinery exposure
- Psychological trauma after serious offshore events — fires, sinkings, man-overboard, witnessing a crewmate's serious injury or death
How These Injuries Happen — And Why It Matters
Your case is not just about the fact that you got hurt. It is about what was wrong on that boat that day, and what should have been done differently. The most common things we see:
- Slick decks — oil, grease, fish slime, hydraulic fluid, water with no nonskid coating, missing deck rails
- Equipment that should have been pulled out of service — frayed lines, broken winches, defective ladders, cracked welds, worn rigging, missing guards
- Undermanned crews — a two-person job assigned to one person to keep payroll down
- No real training — a green hand sent into a dangerous task without a JSA, without a safety briefing, without any meaningful supervision
- Unsafe orders — the captain or company tells you to do something a reasonable mariner would refuse to do, or to do it in worse weather than the job warrants
- Bad lighting in a passageway, on a dock, in the engine room, or at a working area where you can't see what you're stepping on
- Delayed or refused medical evacuation — the captain or office tells you to “wait it out,” “finish the hitch,” or “we'll get you to a doctor at the next port” when the injury actually needed an ambulance
- A vessel that simply wasn't reasonably fit for the job — too old, too poorly maintained, missing safety equipment, missing crew
An employer doesn’t have to make a vessel perfectly safe. But the law requires the employer to use reasonable care to provide a reasonably safe place to work — and the law requires the vessel itself to be reasonably fit for its purpose. When either of those duties is broken and someone gets hurt, that is your case.
What You Can Recover
Texas workers’ comp pays a narrow list of things at modest rates. A maritime injury claim, when it applies, can be much broader. Depending on your case, you may be able to recover:
- All medical bills — past and future
- All lost wages — past and future
- Lost earning capacity — the difference between what you used to be able to earn and what you can earn going forward
- Pain and suffering
- Mental anguish
- Physical impairment and disfigurement
- Daily living expenses while you recover (“maintenance” — see below)
- Reasonable medical care until you reach “maximum medical improvement” (“cure” — see below)
- Extra damages, including attorney's fees and — in extreme cases — punitive damages, when an employer wrongly cuts off the maintenance and cure they owe you
- Wrongful death damages if a family member died on the water
The Daily Pay and Medical Care Your Employer Owes You — Lawsuit or No Lawsuit
Maritime law has a feature ordinary workers’ comp does not: even before any lawsuit, the moment a vessel-based worker is hurt or falls ill in the service of the vessel, the employer has to start paying two things automatically:
- A daily living allowance, called “maintenance” — to cover food and housing while you recover ashore.
- Reasonable medical care, called “cure” — until a real doctor (not just a company doctor) says you have reached “maximum medical improvement” — meaning you are as healed as you are going to get.
These payments are owed regardless of whose fault the injury was. You do not have to sue to get them. The duty is automatic and the employer cannot contract it away.
The catch: many maritime employers pay maintenance at absurdly low daily rates — sometimes $25 or $30 a day, which would not have covered groceries in 1985. Many also use company-selected doctors who are quick to declare “maximum medical improvement” so they can stop paying for treatment. If your employer is paying you a token rate, refusing to pay at all, or cutting off your medical care before you have actually healed, you may be entitled to additional damages — including, in some cases, attorney’s fees and punitive damages.
When the Boat or the Equipment Was the Problem (Not Just the Crew)
Beyond a negligence claim against your employer, you may also have a separate claim against the owner of the vessel — even if the owner is a different company. Maritime law requires the vessel itself to be reasonably fit for its purpose. When the boat is undermanned, the gear is defective, the procedures are unsafe, or the equipment is not what it should be, the vessel is what the law calls “unseaworthy.”
Here is why this matters: the standard against the vessel owner is strict. You don’t have to prove negligence. You have to prove the boat or its gear was not reasonably fit, and that the unfitness caused your injury. Sometimes the employer and the vessel owner are the same company. Sometimes they aren’t — you might be employed by a manning agency while the boat is owned by an operator and chartered by yet a third company. That layered ownership is exactly where many cases produce real recovery, and it’s exactly where firms that don’t know maritime law leave money on the table.
The Deadline: You Generally Have Three Years
Maritime injury claims under the Jones Act and general maritime law generally must be filed within three (3) years of the date of injury, under federal law (46 U.S.C. § 30106). That is different from the two-year deadline most Texans have for ordinary personal injury cases — the federal three-year deadline controls when your case arises out of a maritime injury.
Three years sounds like a long time. It is not. Vessel logs are overwritten. Black-box (VDR) and electronic chart data are purged on rolling cycles. Crewmates transfer to other companies, other vessels, sometimes other countries. Maintenance records and JSAs disappear into shoreside file rooms. The earlier we are involved, the more evidence we can lock down — and the more leverage you have when it comes time to negotiate or try the case.
Important: shorter deadlines apply in some situations:
- Claims involving a vessel owned or operated by the United States (for example, MSC vessels, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredges) generally have a two-year deadline, plus a written-claim presentment requirement that can effectively shorten the window further.
- Some passenger ticket contracts shorten the deadline to one year for cruise passengers (does not generally apply to crew).
- Wrongful death cases at sea also follow the three-year window, but the analysis differs depending on whether the death occurred in territorial waters or on the high seas.
If you don’t know which deadline applies to your case, do not guess. Call us.
What to Do Now
In the first hours and days after a vessel injury, the things that help most are not legal — they are practical. Do everything you reasonably can to preserve:
- The vessel name and the operating company
- The names and contact information of every person on board, especially the captain, mate, and any crewmate who saw what happened
- Copies of any incident report or any statement you signed (and a refusal to sign anything you have not had a chance to read carefully)
- Photos and video of the spot where you were hurt, the equipment involved, and your injuries
- Texts, emails, and voicemails from the company — especially anything telling you to wait on medical care, to come back early, or to say something specific in a statement
- All medical records — including any onboard medical, evacuation, ER, and follow-up
- Pay stubs, timesheets, and crew rosters proving where you were assigned and how much you spent on or in service of vessels
- Any letter, email, or text from the company about maintenance and cure — especially anything cutting it off or reducing it
Don't give a recorded statement to the company adjuster without a lawyer.
Maritime employers and their insurance carriers (often a Protection & Indemnity “P&I” club) send claims professionals to the scene within hours — sometimes before you are even discharged from the hospital. They are friendly. They sound concerned. They are not on your side. Anything you say will be selectively quoted later to argue you were at fault, that the injury was preexisting, or that the boat and the gear were perfectly fine. You are not legally required to give a recorded statement to your employer’s insurer. Politely refuse, and call us.
Why Raven Injury Law
- Founder Charles M.R. “Raven” Vethan: dual Board Certified by the Texas Board of Legal Specialization in Civil Trial Law and Consumer & Commercial Law — a credential held by fewer than 1% of Texas attorneys.
- Dual-state licensed in Texas and California.
- Trial-ready: 90+ matters tried to a jury, judge, or arbitration panel by our founder, over 25+ years.
- We take on tugboat and towboat companies, barge fleets, OSV operators, drilling contractors, vessel charterers, and the P&I clubs that insure them. They are not used to a firm that knows the inside of a vessel as well as the inside of a courtroom.
- Contingency representation. No attorney’s fees unless we recover for you.
- Available day or night. Maritime injuries don’t keep business hours; neither do we.
Where We Practice
Raven Injury Law represents injured maritime workers throughout Houston, Galveston, Texas City, Pasadena, Freeport, Beaumont, Port Arthur, Sabine Pass, Corpus Christi, Brownsville, and the broader Texas Gulf Coast — including injuries on the Houston Ship Channel, the Sabine-Neches Waterway, Galveston Bay, the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, the Outer Continental Shelf, and on vessels that work out of Texas ports anywhere in the world.
Free Case Review
If you got hurt working on a tugboat, towboat, barge, OSV, dredge, drilling vessel, fishing boat, or other vessel — or if your maritime employer is refusing to pay your medical care, refusing to pay your daily living expenses, or telling you to come back to work before you are healed — contact us for a free, confidential case review. We will explain in plain English what kind of case you may have and what realistic next steps look like. No obligation, no fee unless we recover.
The information on this page is general information, not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Every case is different.
Talk to a maritime injury lawyer today.
If you got hurt working on a tugboat, towboat, barge, OSV, dredge, drilling vessel, fishing boat, or other vessel, or if your maritime employer is refusing to pay your medical care or daily living expenses, or telling you to come back to work before you are healed, contact us for a free, confidential case review. We will explain in plain English what kind of case you may have and what realistic next steps look like. No obligation, no fee unless we recover.