Investigating the Claims of the Owner and the Electrical Power Systems of the Key Bridge, Florida, Loss of a New Florida Bridge, during the September 8, 1980, Bridge Disaster

The loss of the bridge caused a lot of money to be paid to the families of the victims as well as the state of Florida, which spent more than $244 million to build a new bridge.

The investigation into the crash of the cargo ship on the bridge in March, killing six people, is still going on.

It’s a very strange situation. But in many respects, how the law is going to apply here is actually fairly well established,” said Martin Davies, the director of the Maritime Law Center at Tulane University in New Orleans. “The difference will just be in the amounts at stake.”

The Key Bridge’s collapse is likely to have the same precedent as theSunshine Skyway Bridge disaster. In 1980, a phosphate carrier slammed into a support pier, causing a 1,200-foot span of the bridge to collapse into Tampa Bay, killing 35 people.

The ship’s owner is trying to cap how much it pays under a law known as the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851 that has been used many times before, including by the owner of the Titanic.

In practice, U.S. courts rarely allow vessel owners to limit their liability, Davies said, especially when there are questions about whether the ship was seaworthy. There are many questions about that in the Dali’s case.

He said he would be surprised if a federal court judge in Maryland concluded that the shipowner could limit its liability.

In April, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board told a Senate committee that investigators are looking into the electrical systems on the ship.

The manufacturer of equipment used in the engine room looked at the electrical power system. We’re continuing to look at that,” Homendy said. “That is where our focus is right now in this investigation.”

Defending the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge with Hurricanes: Negotiating a settlement with a ship’s owner

The circumstances around that crash were very different, however. The ship, named the Summit Venture, did not lose power. It was driven off course by a storm.

“This was an unpredicted force of nature,” said Steve Yerrid, the lawyer who represented Lerro. “Hurricane-force winds that came and went within minutes,” he told NPR.

A ship called the Cosco Busan struck the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in 2007. The bridge was slightly damaged but the ship spilled over 50,000 gallons of fuel oil into the bay. The operator and owner of the ship paid 44 million dollars to clean it up.

According to a lawyer for the cargo insurers who represented them in the Cosco Busan case, the buck stops with the vessel owner.

But Huber says there’s another reason the ship’s owner would do that: It gets lawyers for the government and the parties together in one place to start negotiating a settlement.

“If I had to read the tea leaves, I would say there will be ultimate settlement of all of this by agreement,” Huber said. “But it’s going to take time to fight some of the fights.”