You may remember a couple weeks ago when we reported about the extraordinary story of 10 oil workers who were lost at sea after abandoning their storm-damaged oil rig this month. The men spent three grueling days in the raging Gulf of Mexico before rescuers were able to find their raft on Sept. 11, but only six of the ten oil workers survived.

Just as we predicted, personal injury lawsuits have already been filed by the oil workers and their families. It was reported that two of the workers who survived the incident have decided to sue their employer and its contractors asserting that they could have been taken to safety by another ship, but they were abandoned in midst of Tropical Storm Nate instead. A third personal injury lawsuit has been filed by the family of a worker who did not make it.

All three of the lawsuits were filed in federal court in Galveston, Texas. The suits name three companies as respondents: Geokinetics, Inc., a Houston-based company that supplies seismic data to the oil and gas industry that employed most of the men; Trinity Liftboat Services, a Louisiana-based company that operated the liftboat vessel that the men had been working on; and Mermaid Marine Australia Ltd., an Australian company that owns the standby vessel that allegedly left the workers.

One worker's lawsuit alleges that the "standby" vessel was supposed to pick up the workers and bring them to safety if something went wrong on the liftboat, but instead the standby vessel left the workers, even after it was known the liftboat had been damaged in the storm.

According to the lawsuit, the standby vessel was still in the area when the ten men were forced to board an inadequate lifeboat that they could not all fit into after several inflatable rafts blew away in high winds.

The worker's lawsuit asserts that the workers should have been evacuated from the liftboat before the storm hit. He said that the standby vessel left the men because its own crew was seasick and wanting to return to shore.

The amount of money the lawsuits seek has not been specified. One of the workers said that the main goal of the lawsuits is to prevent oil workers from being put in this situation in the future. It will be an interesting case to follow.

Source: The Associated Press, "Lawsuits filed by workers who floated days in Gulf," Juan A. Lozano, Sept. 24, 2011.