What to Do if You Are Hit by Another Boat in Florida
Several things. After taking care of your medical situation you need to preserve evidence as best as possible. Contact the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. (also known as “FWC”). If FWC is tied up with other cases, contact the local Sheriff’s Office or City Police Department which has a water patrol officer. You need to get as much documentation of the boat crash as possible. Not just by you. By law enforcement. You need to make sure any and all data on your boat is secured. (GPS, radar, chartplotter) This one step is going to be critical to your boating crash injury case. Also, if there are any passengers on your vessel, make sure you have their contact information to give to your maritime law attorneys. This is vitally important because in many boating crash cases, the at-fault boat operator contends your vessel was at fault or that a third vessel was actually at fault. Get as much information as you can about the other vessel. If you took pictures of any aspect of the boat crash, or the boat crash injuries, or of the witnesses, the location, or the vessels involved in the boat crash, make sure those are saved for your maritime attorney. This information will be critical to your boating injury accident case.
USCG Injury Form 2692
If you are on water subject to US Coast Guard jurisdiction you are required to fill out a USCG injury form 2692 for incidents which involve injury or more than $25,000 in property damage. This form must be completed and turned into the USCG by delivery, fax or email within 5 days of the boating injury. The USCG says this information is used to help them investigate incidents, hazardous conditions, and to provide statistical data for maritime casualties and accidents. The information is then used to determine whether new or revised safety initiatives are needed for protection of lives or property in the maritime context. Form 2692 is frequently used in the commercial boating context, but can be mandatory in certain recreational boating accident cases.
Federal law also requires an owner/operator of a recreational vessel involved in a boating accident to report the accident to the State boating authority. In Florida that State agency would be the “FWC”. This must be done when
- A person dies as a result of a boating accident.
- A person requires medical treatment beyond first aid.
- A person disappears from a vessel under facts that indicate death or injury.
- Damage to the vessels involved totals at least $2000.
- A boat is destroyed.
The USCG provides the following form: CG3865. PDF (nd. gov) for recreational boating incident/accident reporting.
Choose the Right Attorneys to Represent You
There are hundreds of pretenders waiting to try to sign up your boating injury crash accident. Why are they pretenders? Because they don’t actually handle boating accident cases like we do every single day. Ask them how many boating accident injury cases they have handled in the last five years. If you force them to answer it is probably “one” or maybe “two”. Does that law firm even know that Florida law is not going to apply to your case, but maritime law is? Very, very unlikely. Car accident attorneys refer their cases to us, and this is because they know that we specialize in boating accident cases. We have been handling boating accident injury cases, Jetski collision cases, parasail injury cases, and cruise ship cases every day for 25 years.
If you choose an attorney who has only handled one or two boating accident cases in the last five-to-ten years, you are doing the equivalent of undertaking surgery with an inexperienced surgeon. Ask yourself: would you subject yourself to a surgeon who had done only one or two of the surgery you need, or would you go with the surgeon who had done that surgery many times? No one wants to have their boating accident injury case handled by a firm who is going to try to figure it out along the way.
Right now we are handling multiple boating accident cases, multiple JetSki accident cases, and multiple cruise ship injury cases. We are not dog-bite attorneys, nor bankruptcy attorneys, or medical malpractice, or divorce, or criminal law attorneys. We are the boating accident and cruise ship injury specialists.
We are here to help you, and to fight for you. You can have confidence in our more than 25 years of helping cruise ship passengers.
We Need to Begin Now So That No Evidence From Your Case Is Lost.
We Are Florida Boat Law Attorneys.
Call Us 24/7 at 888-B-0-A-T-L-A-W.
