Working offshore are often exciting, but it also can be dangerous. regardless of what percentage safety precautions you’re taking , accidents and injuries are common — and sometimes fatal. Offshore workers can experience devastating injuries caused by dangerous conditions on offshore platforms, crew boats, jack-up rigs, and tankers, and within the ocean itself. Workers often aren’t sufficiently trained and work long hours with few breaks, making the danger of injury even higher.
When a significant injury occurs in an offshore accident, it are often emotionally and financially devastating for the victim. It also can be hard to work out where to start out when it involves recovering damages from personal injury or death . an honest place to start out is to contact an offshore accident lawyer with experience in personal injury and admiralty law who can go through the complex details of your case and assist you get the simplest recovery possible.
Common Causes of Offshore Accidents :
Offshore and oilfield accidents are often preventable. they will happen during basket transfers, line handling, vessel collisions, and diving operations. Many accidents are an equivalent as you’d encounter in many workplaces, like equipment failures and slip-and-falls. But because working offshore may be a more high-risk workplace environment, an injury can also result from a fireplace or explosion.
Despite the large budgets related to the refining industry , there’s sometimes little or no training and oversight on an oil rig. this sort of employer negligence may result in an unsafe working environment that results in underqualified employees performing dangerous tasks that they aren’t properly trained for, leading to serious injury.
Offshore accidents commonly cause head trauma, spinal injuries, severed limbs, and other serious injuries. These injuries are often specifically caused by:
- Oil rig injuries. Workers on oil rigs use complex and cumbersome equipment to drill and perform other tasks. Many workers aren’t properly trained on the way to use the needed equipment, which increases the danger of offshore accidents caused by human error.
- Deck accidents. The deck of an oil rig are often a chaotic environment where frenzied workers must constantly get on high alert. Workers are surrounded by trip hazards, fall hazards, electrical hazards, crush hazards, and pinch point hazards. they will easily be struck by heavy equipment, wear wet surfaces, or fall when the sudden lurch of the vessel causes them to lose their balance.
- Equipment failure. When equipment on an offshore vessel fails, it may result during a number of severe injuries. Workers are often burned or electrocuted, crushed, and even lose limbs. Operating machinery on an oil rig requires a high level of caution to stop injuries from occurring.
- Fires and explosions. While not common, fires and explosions are a number of the foremost deadly causes of offshore accidents. they will happen because the results of improperly stored fuel, poorly maintained pipelines, or collisions between vessels. When there’s a fireplace , workers may need to get down the rig into the ocean — often from a height of a minimum of 100 feet. albeit workers are typically trained within the proper thanks to jump, the strain of things may end in a jump that results in severe injury or drowning. Accidents caused by fire and injury can cause life-altering injuries and even the loss of a whole vessel (and the people on it).
- Other vessels. Injuries also commonly occur on tugboats and barges. These include falling overboard, tow lines parting, and handling heavy lines. If helicopters are wont to transport workers offshore, there’s a risk of injury from a helicopter crash.
When you’ve experienced any sort of offshore accident, regardless of the cause, it are often physically and emotionally traumatic. you’ll end up trying to heal from your injuries while deciding the way to affect the loss of a daily and substantial paycheck that supports your family. Our offshore accident lawyers in Austin, Texas, are here to assist you identify the explanation for your accident and therefore the best thanks to get you financially on your feet again.
Damages in an Offshore Accident Case :
An offshore accident are often devastating to you and your family. you’ll have injuries that need extensive and ongoing medical attention and rehabilitation, resulting in medical bills that appear to stay piling up. Or a family may have experienced a casualty that has caused endless pain and suffering. When you’ve also lost your main source of income, it can desire you’ll never find relief.
An offshore accident lawyer can assist you determine the quantity of damages you’ll be ready to recover and negotiate on your behalf to form sure you get the simplest recovery possible. counting on your case, you’ll be eligible for damages that include lost wages, medical expenses, disfigurement, emotional trauma, and pain and suffering.
Your attorney will confirm you’ve got all the needed medical records and documentation to prove tangible costs related to your injury. they’re going to also show how your loss of wages (both presently and within the future) affects you financially, and confirm any third parties are held liable for their negligence.
What Factors Can Affect Your Offshore Accident Case?
Offshore accident cases are often complicated. You’ll got to determine who you’ll legally bring a claim against, how workers’ compensation affects your claim, what proportion coverage is out there , and during which jurisdiction you’ll bring your lawsuit. There are a spread of things which will affect your case, especially once you are trying to point out negligence on the a part of the employer, including the following:
- The amount of risk taken. Working offshore and in oilfields is extremely high risk. The steps you’ll be required to require to urge oil and gas out of the bottom might not even be permitted in many other industries. But due to how lucrative the results are often once you hit pockets of oil or gas, you’ll feel pressured by your employer or other employees to interact in unsafe practices or take bigger risks to urge your job done. These practices are often commonplace. However, so as to reduce the perception of their negligence, your employer may attempt to show that you simply didn’t need to engage in those high-risk behaviors.
- Lack of oversight. there’s often no engineering oversight on a rig, meaning equipment and structures are makeshift and assembled by people that learned from experience instead of official training. once you do things like drilling or running high-pressure fracking lines on the fly without technical guidance, accidents are sure to happen.
- Insufficient training. Employees often use machinery on an oil rig with none training, which may end in injury. they’ll even be performing tasks that are way outside of their regular duties, like acting as fire crew, which may put all other employees in danger also .
- Sleep deprivation. the typical offshore worker works a minimum of 12 hours each day for weeks on end — and is usually woken up within the middle of the night to receive or unload a ship. Even when there’s an evening crew, there could also be a requirement for extra crew on deck. due to the quantity of profit which will be lost when there’s a delay, many employers want employees to travel as fast and much as they will , which frequently means little sleep and more room for error.
- How much insurance can pay out. Most oil companies are self-insured up to some extent . then , they need an insurance firm disburse the remainder . Insurance companies may attempt to adjust their portion of the claim or confirm the company attempts to settle the claim reasonably in order that they don’t need to disburse any money.