Ban recreational use of duck boats by businesses, says former NTSB chair
Private inspector warned company of design flaws
A former chair of the National Transportation Safety Board says duck boats should be banned from commercial recreational use.
James Hall says the boat’s design makes the Second World War-era vessels prone to the kind of accidents that led to the sinking of a duck boat Thursday on a Missouri lake. The sinking killed 17 people.
Hall says he doesn’t believe there’s a way to make the vehicles safe, particularly in bad weather. The duck boat is an amphibious vehicle designed for an assault on beaches.
On Saturday, a private inspector said he warned the company operating the duck boats on Table Rock Lake about design flaws putting the watercraft at greater risk of sinking, less than a year ago.
Steve Paul, owner of the Test Drive Technologies inspection service in the St. Louis area, said he issued a written report for the company in August 2017. It explained why the boats’ engines — and pumps that remove water from their hulls — might fail in inclement weather.
He also said that the tourist boats’ canopies make them hard to escape when they sink — a concern raised by regulators after a similar sinking in Arkansas killed 13 people in 1999.
The accident Thursday evening outside the tourist town of Branson also is raising questions about whether storm warnings in the area went unheeded and whether any agency can keep boaters off the water when inclement weather approaches.
“If you have the information that you could have rough waters or a storm coming, why ever put a boat on that water?” Paul said.
A witness’s video of the duck boat just before it capsized suggests that its flexible plastic windows might have been closed and could have trapped passengers as the hybrid boat-truck went down. It does not show passengers jumping clear.
“The biggest problem with a duck when it sinks is that canopy,” Paul said. “That canopy becomes what I’ll call a people catcher, and people can’t get out from under that canopy.”
A spokesperson for Ripley Entertainment, the company operating the duck boats in Branson, did not respond to telephone and email messages seeking comment. Spokesperson Suzanne Smagala has noted that Thursday’s accident was the only one in more than 40 years of operation.
An archived version of Ripley’s website said it operates 20 duck boats in Branson and described them as “built from the ground up under U.S. Coast Guard supervision with the latest in marine safety.”
Since 1999, duck boats have been linked to the deaths of more than 40 people, with a troubled safety record on the road and water alike. Their height can obscure cars, pedestrians or bicycles from a driver’s view, and maintenance problems can be severe.
Paul said he won’t know until the boat that sank is recovered whether it’s one of the two dozen he inspected for Ripley Entertainment in August 2017.
The U.S. Coast Guard said the boat that sank was built in 1944 and had passed an inspection in February, The Kansas City Star reported.