On March 10, 2017 the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana held that Louisiana substantive law, not maritime law, applied in a dispute governed by the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (“OCSLA”). The plaintiff claimed that he was injured while aboard a fixed SPAR oil and gas production platform known as Devil’s Tower, which is located on the continental shelf off the coast of Louisiana. Devil’s Tower has no means of propulsion and is connected to the seabed by a mooring system consisting of chains, cables, and piles or caissons embedded into the ocean floor. Finding that Louisiana was the adjacent state of the location where the incident occurred and the incident took place on a situs covered by OCSLA, Louisiana state substantive law rather than maritime law governed plaintiff’s lawsuit.
Spisak v. Apache Corporation, et al.
