The Duck Boat update

15 Replies to “The Duck Boat update”

1. They are DUKW vehicles, WWII amphibious vehicles with wheels. They added the glass canopy to the original open top design, which would make it hard to exit the boat in an emergency.

   Pray for the families.

2. The National Weather Service warned of thunderstorms that evening.

   The boat should not have been on the water—as even the owner is admitting, in a desperate attempt to shift the blame to his employees.

   My guess? He had taken to hiring illegal immigrants who couldn’t understand weather reports written in English or simply ignored them, guessing, correctly, that they’d be turned in to ICE if they said no to the boss.

   Let’s see if the media now shedding crocodile tears bother reporting that.

   May the souls of the departed rest in peace and their murderers be swiftly brought to justice.

3. I honestly don’t get this……they had life jackets….the boat sank very slow…..or at least in plenty of time to put the jackets on

   1. allow me to add my shouldacoulda.
      the vests should be *already* on when the boat leaves the friggin dock.
      how many drown on ontariowe per year? over 100. gawd what an awful way to go, cant . . . . get . . . . . air . . . . . .
      those poor kids. I weep for the little ones.
      damn those in charge (was *anyone* ‘in charge’???). damn them all. always some off-the-shelf excuse. damn them.

      1. – Won’t happen. Those things are expensive, and the operator won’t have people wear them because –
         1) they`ll get dirty (or fleas and head lice from going over people`s heads), and they`re not designed to be regularly laundered; and
         2) the paying passengers don`t want to wear them; and if you insist, they`ll take their wallets elsewhere.

         I`d be willing to bet that they were not readily available (or even locked-up so they couldn`t be stolen and sold-off), and the boat`s operator had NO training or instruction on how to use them, how to put them on, when to hand them out to passengers, &c &c ad nauseam.

4. “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and make perpetual Light to shine upon them.”

5. Sad. Funny thing is that when I first heard of this … the LAST thing I thought of was the weather. Rather, The FIRST thing I thought of was all the advertisements and brochures I’ve ever seen for these Duck Boat tours … showing the HIGH SPEED thrills and chills of zig-zagging through canyons of whitewater and whatnot.

6. I wouldn’t go blaming immigrants for this disaster, most of these companies hire cheap student labor for the Summer, and they haven’t a clue about anything to do with seamanship or safety on the water.

   I took a boat tour of Vancouver Harbour a couple of years back, the handsome young fellow who piloted the boat had no experience with boats other than a short training course, which I discovered in a conversation AFTER the tour finished. The kid broke every rule of water safety in order to make the ride “exciting”. Fortunately the boat was an almost unsinkable zodiac type and experienced boaters knew enough to stay well away from the hot rod driver of our excursion boat.
   In some venues, cheap inexperienced labor is dangerous. What dumb bastard would take a heavily loaded tour boat out when a storm is obviously approaching? Probably a minimum wage Summer hire, who was told to get the boat out and bring the money in.

7. Back in the summer, 2002, an amphibious tour boat, called the Lady Duck, sank in the Ottawa River. Four people drowned, including a mother and her two children. I used to live in Ottawa in the 1970s, and watched these tour boats, and they looked very unsafe.

   1. Because of that, I’d never step onto a duckboat. On July 17, we took a tour of the Halifax harbour. The next tour leaving was the duckboat and I refused it because of my safety policy.

      Yesterday, my husband pointed out this story, coming just 4 days after I was assured by a tour operator the duckboats were safe….

8. What a great idea! Take the worst elements of a land vehicle and the worst elements of a watercraft and slam ’em together!
   My only surprise is that accidents like this are not more common. Those things are death traps.

   1. Ha! Too funny. And remember amphibious cars? I beleive the free marketplace took care of THAT bad idea in short order.

      http://www.peimag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Amphicar-696×443.jpg

   2. There’s more than enough blame to go around on this one starting with the criminal operators for leaving the dock under those conditions and the idiot customers who got into the floating death traps. Those things are as seaworthy as a brick and deadly on the highway. Its only a couple of years since the wheel fell off one in Seattle and killed a bunch of kids. I’m no fan of gummit intervention but those things should not be licensed as anything other than an anchor.

9. I wouldn’t mind an amphibious car. But the problem would be finding a way to get all of the other people on the lake to not kick up a wake.

10. here’s another shouldacoulda:
    when Howard Hughes flew around the world, guess what the ‘cargo’ was.
    ping pong balls. yup. if the plane ditched it would NOT sink full of ping pong balls.
    so, why not modify the duckboats to add spray foam insulation or such into every nook and cranny to the extent the craft ABSOLUTELY CANNOT sink under ANY circumstances *whatsoever*? hmmm?
    but that’s hindsight. and yes, the head lice/theft problem applies here, just not with private operaters taking care of their *own* on their own craft.
    seems any time you ‘take it out to the public’ there is a ummm, different set of criteria and considerations like head lice and theft. I didn’t think of that.