Long Beach has agreed to pay $400,000 to an 83-year-old man who suffered a brain bleed and lost sight in his right eye after falling on a cracked roadway outside the Carnival cruise terminal near the Queen Mary. Filippo Ruffino was headed to meet his wife's family for a weeklong Mexican Riviera cruise with stops in Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas when the June 15, 2024, fall left him with injuries that changed his life.
According to the Long Beach Post, Ruffino, who lives in Nevada, was dropped off by a taxi on Windsor Way near Fire Station 6 and had to navigate busy traffic while crossing a street marked by large potholes, according to his lawyer's allegations in the lawsuit he filed against Long Beach and Carnival Corporation. His medical bills topped $39,000, the lawsuit states, and the suit alleged the city failed to fix the dangerous roadway outside the cruise terminal.
Mediation Ends the Case Before Trial
The $400,000 settlement was reached through mediation and approved by the Long Beach City Council earlier this month. Deputy City Attorney Howard Russell said the city settled to avoid the additional expense and risk associated with taking the case to a jury trial, the Long Beach Post's reporting shows.
Court records cited in that reporting indicate Carnival employees controlled traffic in the area near Fire Station 6, and a Long Beach Fire Department captain said in a deposition that fire department staff had repeatedly warned Carnival not to allow passengers to be dropped off there. The captain said the risky drop-off practice had been going on for multiple years. The city, for its part, argued that Ruffino should not have been dropped off in the restricted area near the fire station in the first place.
Carnival Pushes Back
Carnival spokesperson Jodi Venturoni told the outlet that Ruffino's lawsuit lacked merit because the incident did not occur onboard the company's ship or even inside the cruise terminal. “We stand firmly behind our safety standards,” Venturoni said. The settlement reporting does not disclose whether Carnival paid any portion of the $400,000, and that detail remains unresolved.
A City With a Pothole Problem
Ruffino's case lands amid a dramatic spike in what Long Beach has paid out over its crumbling streets. The city paid nearly $240,000 combined for 13 pothole-related lawsuits from 2020 through 2023, but that figure climbed to at least $18.38 million for just three lawsuits in 2024 alone, per the Long Beach Post's data. One of those cases, according to a low-confidence account from the Daily Journal, involved a Los Angeles County jury awarding $17.5 million to a 50-year-old Long Beach woman who fractured her ankle outside a Zaferia supermarket in 2024.
An audit released last year found Long Beach's street conditions ranked among the worst compared with a dozen other cities and counties, even though the city spent far more per mile on streets than most of those comparison jurisdictions. NBC Los Angeles reported that more than a third of Long Beach's streets were rated poor or very poor in 2023, when the city's Pavement Condition Index score sat at 56, below its own target of 60. Long Beach's roads ranked in the bottom three among several Southern California cities and counties it was compared against, the outlet found, despite the city spending more than $300 million on street improvements since 2020.
Backlogs Persist Despite Repair Pushes
The city has tried to close the gap. A Spring Cleaning Initiative set a goal of filling roughly 63,000 potholes, and after nearly three months the city reported repairing at least half of them, according to the Los Angeles Times. Rainfall that weakened road surfaces drove a 30% citywide increase in potholes, the newspaper reported, prompting crews to expand from their standard setup to six crews working six days a week, double normal operations, on top of the roughly 40,000 potholes Public Works crews repair in an average year.
Even with that surge, a backlog of 20,000 potholes remained citywide, according to a Public Works Department memo cited by FOX 11 Los Angeles. The same memo estimated pavement repairs at the city's most in-need parks would cost $9.3 million, with another $10 million needed just to address El Dorado Regional Park. Long Beach's current funding plan falls $20 million short of what's recommended to meet its pavement-rating goals, even with a five-year, $533 million infrastructure program known as Elevate 28 underway, per NBC Los Angeles.
What the Law Requires
Under California Government Code section 835, a public entity can be held liable for an injury caused by a dangerous condition of its property if a plaintiff establishes that the property was in a dangerous condition at the time of the injury and that the condition proximately caused the harm, among other elements laid out in the statute, according to California Legislative Information. That legal standard applies to claims involving injuries caused by dangerous conditions on public property, and Long Beach's latest pavement score is 61, above its target of 60.
