After an $800k yacht pileup in Ballard Locks, a fleet of lawyers arrives [The Seattle Times]

May 28—Jason Formo figures he's been through the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks in Ballard at least a hundred times in his 43 years. But none of that prepared him for the chaos of late last May or the complicated legal fight just now getting underway.

Shortly before noon on May 28, 2022, Formo and several family members were aboard his 53-foot motor yacht, Nor'Wester, in the larger of the two locks, waiting for the gate to open.

It was a busy Memorial Day Saturday, and big boats like Formo's were tied along the southeastern wall, with rows of smaller boats "rafted" off their starboard sides.

The gate had just started opening, Formo and other boaters say, when the Pamina, a 64-foot yacht directly ahead of Nor'Wester, gunned its engines and went hard in reverse.

Amid the roar of diesels and the snapping of mooring lines, Pamina slammed into Nor'Wester "like a bulldozer," striking with such force that Nor'Wester's bow went over Pamina's stern and into a rear cabin, Formo says.

Behind him, in a very expensive illustration of Newton's third law, Formo's 53-foot motor yacht struck a 60-foot motor yacht, which struck a 59-foot motor yacht, which was pushed into the lock's eastern gate, according to interviews and court filings.

Meanwhile, the smaller rafted vessels caromed off one another like "bumper boats," as one yachting insider later put it.

No serious injuries were reported, but a total of eight vessels were "allided," to use the nautical term, causing upward of $800,000 in damage before Pamina's captain, Brian Pickering of Seattle, managed to kill the engines.

In the relative calm that followed, Formo recalls Pickering apologizing profusely, but also "a fair amount of expletives" as other dazed sailors tried "to figure out what had happened."

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A year later, a small armada of boat owners, insurers, marine businesses and more than a dozen attorneys are trying to sort out that very question.

Admittedly, the lawsuit — essentially, a dispute among insurers over the bill for all that cracked fiberglass and teak — won't be the weightiest matter heard in federal court in Seattle.

But it could be among the more complex, given the awkwardly large number of parties and the peculiarities of U.S. maritime law — to say nothing of the mechanics of what was arguably the biggest pileup in the history of Seattle yachting.

A multivehicle crash is "something you see on a freeway, with cars, but not with vessels," says Charles Moure, a Seattle maritime law attorney (and avid boater) who is following the Pamina case but is not involved. "You're going to get into some complicated litigation."

Indeed, while a trial is more than a year off, court filings so far point to a dispute that has the same bumper-boat dynamics of the accident itself.

Start with the owners and insurers of the allided boats.

Most have declined to discuss the case. But the four who've filed claims put fault largely on Pamina, a 40-ton, $700,000 luxury vessel, with three paneled staterooms, a full-size galley and more horsepower than a D10 Caterpillar bulldozer that is owned, through a limited liability corporation, by Pickering and his wife, Laurie Pickering, who was also aboard during the accident.

Pamina was operating "without sufficient competent crew," states a Feb. 23 filing by Seattle resident Nicholas Leede, whose 39-foot sailboat suffered $62,117 in damage while rafted in the back row.

Brian Pickering "was not at the helm" just before the crash, contends a Feb. 28 filing by Anahit Hovhannisyan, a Mercer Island resident whose 60-footer was two boats back from Pamina.

Hovhannisyan hasn't yet specified repair costs, but does claim to have "suffered personal injury and mental distress" after being "narrowly missed by an airborne cleat that was detached in the incident."

Formo has claimed $206,554 in damage, while a fourth owner, William Hansen, has claimed damage of $162,922 to his 59-footer.

The Pickerings and their insurer, meanwhile, lay out a very different narrative: Pamina, they say, went into reverse more or less on its own.

According to filings, various control systems, including controls for Pamina's engines and remote controls for its engines and bow thruster, "failed to operate properly."

In due course, the Pickerings and their insurer have filed claims against two controls manufacturers and two Seattle-area marine businesses that serviced Pamina shortly before the crash.

Those "third-party defendants" aren't sitting still, of course.

Delta Marine Industries, a shipyard that worked on Pamina, alleges that any damage was "caused, contributed to or enhanced by [the Pickerings'] own comparative fault, gross negligence and/or reckless disregard of the consequences."

Glendinning Products, a South Carolina-based controls maker, is more specific: "negligent and improper modifications" to controls equipment aboard Pamina "contravened manufacturer recommendations" and "rendered [Pamina] unseaworthy," according to filings.

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Untangling this game of three-dimensional legal hot potato will require extensive, expensive investigations.

Sailors and other witnesses will be deposed. Damaged vessels will be inspected by forensic experts at rates of $500 and more. Thick reports will be written and exchanged among counsel.

"It's going to be a slog," says Wayne Mitchell, a Seattle-area attorney representing Hovhannisyan and the LLC that owns her boat.

In many multiparty negligence cases, if forensics makes it reasonably clear which parties are at fault — and which way a court would likely rule — insurers may push to settle rather than wage a costly, low-odds court battle.

"Insurance companies are very sophisticated entities," says Moure. Using massive databases of similar litigation, insurers can calculate what any given case is worth and "are good at offering just enough money to make the plaintiff not want to run the risk of trial," he says.

But Pamina has a few extra complications.

The dispute falls under U.S. maritime law, which has unique things to say about who pays what in accidents.

Under the Limitation of Liability Act of 1851, if the vessel owner can prove they didn't know and shouldn't have known about a hazard, their liability is capped at their vessel's post-accident value, no matter how much damage was done.

If the Pickerings can show they weren't aware of any problems with their yacht, the most their insurer pays is $550,000, or Pamina's assessed value after subtracting its own damage of $150,000.

Runaway yachts weren't the problem the liability limit was meant to solve. Nineteenth century lawmakers were trying to protect America's nascent shipping industry from potentially ruinous litigation at a time when accidents were common.

But liability limitation has become a standard defense even in cases with very little connection to shipping, including those involving houseboats, Jet Skis and cruise ships. (Titanic's owners, infamously, used the law to avoid all but a tiny fraction of the claims against them.)

And while liability limitation strategies frequently fail, they can add still more layers of litigation to already complex cases.

All that counterclaiming and crossclaiming might be avoided by settling, but the large number of litigants and of lawyers — 15 at last count — still points to a protracted process, legal experts say.

"Even if we settle it, it's going to take months," says Mitchell. "And if we try it, it's going to be over a year."

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Fifteen lawyers working a multiyacht pileup in the Locks sounds like the punchline to a joke about Ballard. Or at the very least, a metaphor for what the Seattle area is becoming in the third decade of the 21st century.

For now, though, there seems to no single, agreed-upon moral to the story — even within the local yachting community, where news of the pileup quickly made the rounds and where the incident remains a topic of conversation.

Some might see the crash as a cautionary tale about boating safety in the Puget Sound's challenging waterways, not least the Ballard Locks, which even experienced sailors can find daunting.

Since 2020, Locks officials have recorded three collisions, even though pleasure craft traffic through the Locks is half of what it was in 2000, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the Locks.

"I think sometimes people forget what a problematic environment [the Locks] can be if you're not really on your toes," says Gina Purdy, a longtime member of the Seattle Yacht Club.

Others note the trend toward larger vessels.

Between 2000 and 2020, the number of vessels 50 feet and longer in Washington state climbed by nearly 75%, according to an analysis of state boat registrations by Anacortes-based BST Associates, which consults on waterfront projects.

"When I started, it was older people who had bigger, nicer boats, because they worked up 'through the ranks,'" says Neal Booth, 63, president of the Boat Insurance Agency at Elliott Bay Marina and veteran of Seattle's boating scene.

Today, Booth says, "someone decides they want a 50-foot boat, they go buy a 50-foot boat."

Some say those bigger boats reflect the area's rising wealth, not least in booming sectors such as tech.

Others says it's also due to advances in control technologies. Features like bow and stern thrusters, remote docking, joystick steering and GPS-powered "digital anchors" have made it easier for less-experienced sailors to handle larger vessels, says Byron Shirley, a broker at Denison Yachting in Seattle.

While many insurers still require boats of around 75 feet or more to be professionally captained, for anything less than that, there are far "fewer barriers to entry."

He points to a hot new model: a 62-footer with a $2.4 million price and all the latest technology. "One or two people can run that boat," Shirley says, but adds that he worries the new technologies might be giving some boaters "a false sense of confidence."

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As for allided boaters themselves, many seem to have migrated to the role of observers, as insurers and attorneys dig into the case.

Several appear to have their boats repaired and back on the water.

The Pamina has recently been through the Locks and has berthed at Fishermen's Terminal, according to an online vessel tracking service, but its current location isn't available.

Whatever meaning they've attached to the accident isn't clear, since most still won't publicly comment on the crash or the legal case. Formo, after an initial interview, hasn't responded to additional queries.

Still, in his initial comments, Formo expressed a mix of feelings that might resonate with his fellow Locks occupants.

Yes, the accident was briefly terrifying and also costly: Though his boat is fixed, his insurance premiums have doubled "even though none of this was our fault," he said.

Yet Formo, a financial adviser, was also quick to concede how much worse things could have been in the Locks last May.

Nobody was seriously hurt. And despite the extensive damage, everyone involved remained relatively polite and even understanding toward the Pickerings, who in turn "handled the situation with class."

Formo also acknowledged how little he and his fellow yachters had to complain about in the first place, given what else was going on in the world.

"This was in the middle of the pandemic," Formo said of the accident. "People were dying all over the place. We got a few scratches on our boat."

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