Long Beach has agreed to pay $400,000 to an 83-year-old man who suffered a severe head injury when he fell on a stretch of cracked road outside the Carnival Cruise terminal near the Queen Mary.
The fall on June 15, 2024, left Filippo Ruffino with a brain bleed and the loss of sight in his right eye, according to a lawsuit he filed against Long Beach and Carnival Corporation.
In the lawsuit, his lawyer alleges that Ruffino was dropped off by a taxi on Windsor Way near Fire Station 6 and “had to make quick decisions on how to navigate busy traffic conditions and crossed a street with large potholes.”
Ruffino, who lives in Nevada, had planned to meet his wife’s family at the Long Beach cruise terminal to depart on a weeklong Mexican Riviera cruise with stops in Puerto Vallarta, Mazatlan and Cabo San Lucas.
Instead, his fall left him with a severe head injury and medical bills that topped $39,000, according to the lawsuit.
Long Beach chose to settle the case to avoid “additional expense and risk associated with a jury trial,” Howard Russell, deputy city attorney, wrote in an email.
The settlement amount of $400,000 was reached through mediation and approved by the Long Beach City Council earlier this month, Russell wrote.
Long Beach has had to shell out more money in recent years for verdicts and settlements related to potholes and worn roads. From 2020 through 2023, the city paid nearly $240,000 combined for 13 pothole-related lawsuits, according to data obtained by the Long Beach Post.
In 2024, that number climbed to at least $18.38 million for three lawsuits, which included a jury awarding $17.5 million to a 50-year-old Long Beach woman who developed a rare pain condition after fracturing her ankle outside a Zaferia neighborhood supermarket.
An audit released last year found that Long Beach ranked among the worst for its street conditions, compared to a dozen other cities and counties, despite spending far more per mile than most.
Ruffino’s suit alleged Long Beach failed to fix the dangerous roadway outside the cruise terminal.
The city argued Ruffino shouldn’t have been dropped off there in the first place as it’s a restricted area near a fire department.
A Long Beach Fire Department captain told Ruffino’s lawyer in a deposition that several Carnival employees are in charge of traffic control in that area and that fire department staff had repeatedly warned them not to allow passengers to be dropped off there, according to court records.
The LBFD captain said that dangerous practice had been going on “for multiple years.”
Carnival, for its part, claimed that Ruffino’s lawsuit “lacked merit as the incident did not occur onboard our ship or even inside the cruise terminal,” company spokesperson Jodi Venturoni wrote in an email.
Carnival would not say if it paid anything to settle the lawsuit.
“We stand firmly behind our safety standards,” Venturoni wrote.