The duck boat disaster in Missouri is one of the worst US tourist boating accidents in the last fifteen years, since a tourist boat capsized in Lake George, NY. In the incident near Branson, Missouri, some seventeen people, including nine from a single extended family, drowned in the accident.
The duck boat that capsized and sank in Table Rock Lake was raised from 80 feet of water today, and the postmortems will begin as the funerals end. Operator Ride the Ducks has offered to pay for related medical bills and funeral expenses, return all personal items from the scene, and assist with travel or accommodations for the affected families.
Unfortunately, the aging ‘ducks’ like the one that sank last week, essentially 70- year amphibious World War II invasion craft now repurposed for tourist use, have a particularly troubling history. ‘Duck boats’ have suffered a number of fatal accidents similar to the Missouri disaster. On May 1, 1999, 13 people drowned in Lake Hamilton, near Hot Springs, Arkansas, when the ‘duck’ Miss Majestic sank in 60 feet of water. Some 13 people drowned, including 3 children, many trapped by the boat’s canopy.
National Transportation Safety Board chairman Jim Hall told USA Today that the disaster on Table Rock Lake seemed all too similar to that 1999 disaster. Hall compared duck boat excursions to ‘unregulated amusement park rides,’ and said “My feeling after seeing this one is that the only thing to do in the name of public safety is to ban them. It’s the responsible thing to do to ensure (riders) are not put at risk.”
There have been at least 8 fatal accidents involving duck boats in the last 8 years, both on land and in the water.
For example, in 2002, just three years after “Miss Majestic” went down, four people drowned in the Ottawa River in Quebec when the Lady Duck sank, reportedly because the hull wasn’t watertight.
And in Philadephia, two young Hungarian tourists drowened when their duck lost power in the Delaware River and was rammed by a tugboat-propelled barge. The families of the victims were awarded a $17 million judgment, and their attorney described the ‘ducks’ as “death traps.”
Duck boats have also kept tourists in Britain on their toes. In 2013, the tour company known as Yellow Duckmarine had not one but two incidents of ducks sinking at the waterfront, with passengers forced to swim to shore or be rescued by nearby boats. Investigators found the company’s ‘ducks’ suffered “a high number of mechanical breakdowns, hull failures and flooding incidents.” One of the sunken ducks was described as “not seaworthy” with a “heavily corroded hull.” That same year in London, duck passengers were forced to jump overboard after the boat caught fire. Twenty people were hospitalized.
But there’s another, almost forgotten parallel to the Table Rock Lake disaster. That duck boat tragedy took place in Lake Garda, Italy 73 years ago.
Duck boats were originally built from 1942 to 1945 as DUKWs, a military acronym for a hybrid ‘swimming truck’. The DUKWs, inevitably known as ‘ducks’, transported US troops and supplies to beach heads, crossing rivers like the Rhine and driving on land over roads in both the European and Pacific theaters. DUKWs were also supplied to Britain, Russia and Australia for use in their war efforts, and later served in Korea.
The DUKWs played an important role, but many were lost for reasons other than enemy action. Overloading, mechanical breakdowns (like running out of fuel so their pumps wouldn’t operate) storms, high seas, waves, and ship wakes took their toll. At the Normandy invasion, on June 6 and 7, for example, 41 DUKWs were lost.
The disaster at Lake Garda was a tragic example. A number of DUKWs were attached to the US Army’s 10th Mountain Division during the Italian campaign at the end of World War II. (Perhaps the most famous surviving member of the 10th Mountain Division is former US Senator and Presidential candidate Bob Dole, who recently celebrated a birthday.) Facing German forces on the other side of the lake, 26 US soldiers were loaded onto a DUKW in the Italian town of Torbole. But as they moved from west to east, the vehicle stalled, took on water and quickly sank. Only one soldier was able to swim back; the other 25 went down with the overloaded DUKW. Missing for almost 70 years, Italian divers found the DUKW in 276 meters of water in 2012. There are no plans to recover the remains.
Considering the troubling post-war history of the ‘ducks’, perhaps the accident will also be a wake-up call for tourist destinations like Branson. Certainly, the duck tours are ‘cute’ and provide a unique land-and-water perspective on a destination. But after all, the first duty of a destination is to make sure it is making every effort to keep tourists safe.
