All Articles

A tug is assisting a loaded barge into a berth. The tug’s master misjudges the approach, the barge strikes the dock, and there is damage to the barge, the dock, and the cargo. Who pays depends almost entirely on two things. Which contract form governs, and which side of the Atlantic you are on. International towage has settled on a risk allocation that the United States Supreme Court declared void as a matter of public policy in 1955 and has never retreated from. That decisio

Most maritime companies in the United States are privately held. Family towing operations, regional barge lines, terminal companies, shipyards, forwarders, and single-vessel owners. No public shareholders, no securities filings, and frequently no formal board beyond the people who own the business. The common assumption in that setting is that directors and officers liability insurance is something public companies buy to satisfy investors. It is not. Private company leadersh

A tank barge on the Lower Mississippi carrying 30,000 barrels of product is, in insurance terms, a modest asset. The hull value is a fraction of a deepsea tanker. The crew is small. The trade is domestic and familiar. The pollution exposure attached to it is not modest, it is not limited to the value of the barge, and under a set of circumstances that are considerably easier to trigger than most operators assume, it is not limited at all. This article covers how the Oil Pollu

Somewhere in your hull policy there is a figure. It was probably set when the vessel was acquired, adjusted once or twice since, and has not been examined closely in years. That number is not an administrative detail. It determines what you are paid if the vessel is lost, whether a casualty counts as a total loss at all, whether you are forced to repair a boat that is not worth repairing, and how much cover you can lawfully buy elsewhere. It is one of the few genuinely strate

On August 17, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers granted the federal permit authorizing construction of the Louisiana International Terminal at Violet in St. Bernard Parish, on the Lower Mississippi River downriver from New Orleans. The permit clears the last major regulatory hurdle for what Port NOLA describes as the only new greenfield container port currently under development in the United States. Construction is expected to take five years. The projected investment is roug

On July 19, 2024, a deckhand named among the five crew aboard the towing vessel Miss Peggy drowned in the galley of his own boat after it was struck from behind and rolled over in the Houston Ship Channel. Four of his shipmates got out. He did not. The National Transportation Safety Board released its investigation report on August 6, 2026. It runs 92 pages, and the finding at the center of it is one that every safety manager in the industry should read carefully, because it

Most operators treat renewal as a price negotiation. The broker goes to market, quotes come back, and the conversation is about which number is lowest and whether last year's terms can be held. That framing misses where the leverage sits. By the time quotes are being compared, the underwriter has already formed a view of the risk, and that view was built from the loss runs, the survey report, and a set of judgments about how the operation is run. For a small fleet, those judg

Ten years after it took effect, Subchapter M is no longer a new regulation. It is the operating framework for the entire U.S. towing industry, and the phase-in that occupied everyone's attention between 2016 and 2022 is long finished. What has replaced it is a renewal cycle, and that cycle is producing a specific set of problems right now for operators who obtained their first Certificate of Inspection early. Requirements that were deferred for five years are coming due, and