The Texas oil company blamed for a spill in Orange County, California, has sued two worldwide shipping companies for rupturing the pipeline, increasing the international stakes in an already busy proposed class action.

The complaint filed Monday in the Central District of California also says the vessel traffic controller Marine Exchange of Southern California negligently and recklessly allowed the ships to remain anchored near the pipeline during bad weather, then failed to notify Amplify of dragged anchors.

Wylie Aitken of Aitken Aitken Cohn. (Courtesy photo)

Interim class counsel Wylie Aitken said Amplify's allegations "should in no way be interpreted as eliminating the obvious culpability of Amplify and its entities." 

"There is seldom only one reason for a disaster. We will be including the ships as well, but we will not be distracted by their need to step up and join us in creating injunctive relief to actively protect the precious California Coastline," Aitken said in a text message to Law.com.

The new complaint follows a consolidated class action complaint from Aitken and the other plaintiff counsel that also names the owners of the ships, the MSC Danit and the Cosco Beijing, as defendants, and it highlights an earlier showdown in which one ship essentially tried to arrest the other through a court order. 

A status conference with U.S. District Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California also revealed a behind-the-scenes effort by plaintiffs attorneys to identify counsel for the ships, and navigate the international laws governing proper lawsuit service, with one telling the judge they'd gleaned who the ships' attorneys are through a prior case, and that they'd learned that morning that one of the companies believed the process used to serve it was faulty.

Still, interim class counsel Lexi Hazam of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein said the ships appeared amenable to waiving service, and Amplify's counsel said the company secured letters of understanding with both entities that thwarted an arrest.

"We could have arrested the ships, but they didn't want that," Daniel Donovan, a partner at Kirkland & Ellis in Washington, D.C., said during the Feb. 23 conference. "We never had to arrest the ships because we have letters of understanding with both."