Seacor Power crewmate’s harrowing tale of survival recounted in new federal lawsuit

One of six survivors of the capsized Seacor Power lift boat recounted a harrowing tale of being thrown around the rolling vessel and escaping through a smashed window into the Gulf of Mexico before his rescue hours later, in a federal lawsuit filed over the April 13 calamity.

Dwayne Lewis never learned to swim after his brother drowned as a child; his parents never let him around water, he said in the lawsuit, filed Friday.

Even so, Lewis boarded the Seacor Power at the Bollinger shipyard in Port Fourchon on April 13. He was an independent consultant headed to a Talos Energy platform near the mouth of the Mississippi River to supervise “well site cement pumping operation.”

Lewis was assigned a stateroom on the third deck of the boat’s port side and settled in for a nap before leaping out of bed as the 175-foot-long vessel, with 19 crew members and contractors aboard, began to roll over lengthwise. his lawsuit states.

“The ceiling became a wall, one wall became the floor, the floor became a wall, and the other wall became the ceiling,” the suit says.

A vessel’s mate climbed into Lewis’ stateroom with him, but they couldn’t shove open a window to flee the capsizing boat. They found a fire extinguisher and bashed the window for several minutes until the glass finally shattered, the suit says.

Lewis threw on a life jacket. The mate said they needed to “get out now,” but Lewis was scared. He stayed inside “as long as he could, getting tossed around the room, and getting bruised and battered” before finally escaping through the window, according to his lawsuit.

He “felt a rope, grabbed it, and tried to hang on,” but the rope slipped and he drifted off from the sunken boat. Lewis said he bobbed for more than three hours until a nearby boat, the M/V Mr. Lloyd, pulled him from the Gulf.

The lawsuit says Lewis suffers post-traumatic stress from what his attorney, Frank Lamothe, described as a near-death experience as Lewis repeatedly went under in the Gulf.

“It was horrific. In so many ways he could have lost his life,” Lamothe said. “He would go under and bob back up. Each time he went under he thought that might be the end.”

Lewis’ lawsuit is the latest of at least 13 that have been filed so far in federal or state courts over the tragic flipping of the Seacor Power about eight miles offshore.

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