The headline's provocative but it may be worth observing that even the original duck boats were/are WWII surplus vehicles that I'm pretty sure don't meet modern safety standards and are possibly even worse after some of the modifications like canopies.
And presumably someone in government (in a lot of places) signed off on transporting people in these.
Yes, someone with more experience and even professionally licensed should probably have signed off on the mods. But no one OKing this service required it and it's not clear the modifications were responsible for what happened or it was just something that can happen when duck boats generally are operated in the way that they're operated.
You're right, but I suspect that one couldn't find a modern naval engineer who would approve any design based on a boat with insufficient flotation. If you cut a modern factory-built boat in half, both halves will float. If one of these duck coffins springs a leak, it's going to the bottom. So, the focus on the engineering degree isn't totally off-base, because a qualified engineer would just "nope" the whole thing.
The NTSB really should have put an end to this industry in 1999. It's tough to imagine that they won't fix their mistake this time around.
The one in Seattle suffered an axle break on a bridge, slamming into a charter bus.
These things are insanely heavy, put through daily stress, and are basically maintained by carnies.
Whether they're sinking like brick or eviscerating the sides of buses, it's clear that they don't belong on the road.
Can't they just sunset these stupid things for the sake of the businesses, let wealthy collectors buy the old boats for their own purposes (and at their own risk), and force "Ride the Ducks" (who constantly insists that is not a single entity, despite having the same brand and business model), to purchase modern amphibious tour buses that pass safety regulations.
Surely there would become an immediate demand for a safe, comfortable, maneuverable amphibious vehicle in the wake of a crackdown on these deathtraps.
My wife recently rode one in the lower Wisconsin Dells and the outboard motor blew while they were breaching the water. The tour guide said this was the first it's ever happend. :rolleyes:
You're probably thinking of boats like Boston Whalers that have flotation foam built into the hull and will float when cut in half. But there are many other types of modern factory-built boats which will sink immediately if they take on enough water.
Anything 20' or less has to have that flotation by law. Lots of brands install it in all boats regardless of length. There's a video of the back half of a 35' Carolina Skiff motoring around. [0] Obviously ducks are longer than 20', but no engineer would sign off on "sinks immediately". Larger vessels have various methods of buoyancy control. Nothing modern is built like a duck.
Most monohull sailboats don't even have keels let alone weights. Certainly any sailboat designed to handle a capsize, which is all but the very largest, will not sink from a puncture, with keel-weight or without. Remember that interminable Robert Redford movie? That boat had a puncture the size of a shipping container...
> Most monohull sailboats don't even have keels let alone weights.
That's factually incorrect. Smaller monohulls that focus on racing performance often do not have weights, though they will certainly have a keel to reduce drift when sailing upwind. The exceptions are certain classes of tiny sports vessels.
Larger monohulls that are designed to be lived on are generally categorised under "class A" according to Europe's CE certification, but are probably sold with equal safety standards around the world. Class A means that they are impossible to fully capsize and will not sink with even a reasonable amount of water in them (well, de facto at least, de jure they only need to survive certain wind and sea conditions). For example, a class A yacht may roll over 90° onto its side and fill up with water, but will not sink. To pull this off, these yachts have heavy weights on the end of their keels to counterbalance the force of the wind pushing them into the water.
However, given enough water in them, even class A yachts will begin to sink.
Centerboards are not keels. You may not care about dinghies such as e.g. Lasers, but there are a whole hell of lot more of them around than there are keeled yachts. Neither of which have a damn thing to do with this discussion, since as I already noted and you repeated they're both much safer than ducks. This thread is like a parody: a stream of idiotic "well, actually"'s.
The comparison is between boats designed by engineers in the last fifty years, and boats not so designed. You're the one who wanted to talk about sailboats, which in support of my point are also safer than ducks. Please educate yourself before promulgating falsehoods: "Pretty much every monohull sailboat ever manufactured will sink immediately if the hull is punctured." Hilarious!
The NTSB really should have put an end to this industry in 1999.
They did everything they could legally do, which is to say that they issued many strongly worded recommendations. Unfortunately they don’t have the legal authority to actually force anyone to do anything.
I could be wrong, but I believe both the federal Department of Transportation and their state equivalents have this authority. So far, they haven’t done it though.
As with most of these issues, it’s quite likely that a private market solution would be most effective. If insurance companies refused to cover these boats, or they at least forced clients to implement all NTSB recommendations, the problems associated with this industry would largely disappear overnight. According to the NTSB, the reason the death rate is so high when these things sink is because the canopy doesn’t come off. They had specific recommendations that would address this problem, and the industry seems to have entirely ignored them.
Ban the use of anything designed and constructed during WWII for amphibious transport of the public. There's no way you'll ever get enough flotation in there. If someone wants to invest enough to develop a new amphibious vehicle to replace the existing stock, that's fine, but I doubt the market would support such an undertaking. Thus the industry would disappear without any excessive action.
My Dad used them to transport cargo from ship to shore when they were constructing an air base in Thule Greenland. They are for getting stuff ashore in places where there isn’t a harbor.
You don't really deserve the downvotes you're getting. This is a widespread tourist attraction and I'd have to see some statistics to conclude that it's an especially unsafe one. That said, they deserve a serious look at what could be practically done to retrofit for greater safety (flotation, sorry but you get wet if it rains, wear PFDs) and otherwise set stricter operating guidelines.
Philadelphia's fleet of 20 to 25 duck boats have been
involved in three fatalities in five years, he said. "If
you compare those rates to the number of fatalities per mile
driven in a passenger car, you are talking about rates of
fatalities literally thousands of times higher."
If you search Google news (use a date range prior to this month's accident) you'll see regular deadly incidents going back years.
The NTSB did a huge review after a 1999 incident with 13 deaths. Conclusion? They're death traps. Duck boats swamp easily and sink like a stone. If there's a canopy people get dragged straight to the bottom.
The industry is huge and economically important. So perhaps just grandfather existing duck boats as long as they don't have a canopy. If you want a fancy duck boat with windows and a canopy, then buy a properly designed boat that isn't a death trap.
EDIT: Reading through the Google News results it seems these things are more deadly on land than in water.
Yes, they are hard to drive in urban areas, which is a shocker considering they were designed to drive on the ocean/beach. In Seattle we have them and they have a pretty bad record about hitting people in crosswalks, even running over a guy on a harly. They are so far above traffic that you just can't see that shit. Not to mention a couple of years ago when the axil popped off and ripped a tour bus in half killing a few kids and sending a good number to the hospital.
Amphibious tours in amphibious cities would be great, but I doubt you could even get those things approved now, and no one actually has the money to make a new fleet and profit.
It is also probably note worthy that the original design was made for a situation where loss of human life was already expected.
Growing up in a family of commercial fishermen/sailors I have often heard complaints that the drivers of these things possess limited boating experience and routinely cause interruptions or annoyance for other waterborne vessels. I've never ridden one, though, or captained a boat in my life, so feel free to file this wherever you keep your unsourced anecdotes.
The article says there are versions that don’t have the top, that would fix most of the issue. Wearing lifevest you’d be able to get out safely instead of being trapped inside.
That would address most of the concern about the boats sinking, because every passenger could safely wear a floatation device.
However, they're unsafe in other ways. The 2015 crash in Seattle, which killed 4, was caused by a snapped axle. When I read that the duck design was "stretched" by someone with zero engineering training, that sounds awfully suspicious.
An additional concern is the the safety & maintenance records themselves. As part of the settlement in Seattle, the company admitted to 463 separate violations:
By that logic, we should just ban rollercoasters; they're inherently unsafe, obviously, and it's a lost cause to try to make them more safe. Never mind that we've spent more than a century doing just that. No reason why duckboats can't get the same treatment.
> Yes, someone with more experience and even professionally licensed should probably have signed off on the mods. But no one OKing this service required it and it's not clear the modifications were responsible for what happened or it was just something that can happen when duck boats generally are operated in the way that they're operated.
From the article:
"In the water, duck boats are like a “sinking coffin” when they start to flood, said McCaskill, who plans to draft legislation proposing stronger safety standards for duck boats."
Forgive the dead horse beating, but this is why it's frequently said on HN (and in general) that safety laws and regulations are written in blood. People die, gaps are identified, gaps are closed, time passes, people complain about regulation.
I feel the same. It's a similar problem to code comments / commit messages. You look at a line of code and wonder, why on Earth is it there? You hope there's an explanatory comment nearby, or that you can git-blame your way into a commit message.
Law is similar, except on much longer timescales. I wish the laws would carry both inline explanation (comments), and explanations of reasoning and causes when changed (commit messages).
This is part of the reason I hate the mentality that all code is self-documenting, so to speak. I've seen corporate environments that frown on any code commenting besides standard headers and such...
I think it's very naive to think, especially in the political climate of the last few decades, that people who call for repeal of regulation are first of all reading the text and second would be averted from repeal if it simply contained a rationale or they had it explained to them.
De-regulators know there is a reason, in many cases they understand it well. They don't care.
I didn't claim there would be less deregulation. However, it would be harder to misrepresent the original intent and easier to trace recurrence back to repeal.
It has been mentioned (but not corroborated) that the engines are prone to stalling in rough waters... something you do not want to happen, aside from capsizing.
I think after the NTSB is done, it's likely these get taken off waterways --at which point, there is no reason to keep them as land only vehicles since they get such poor mileage and offer a poor bumpy ride.
Maybe. These are a big tourist attraction in a lot of places. The NTSB made a number of recommendations in the past (which were mostly not followed). And I don't see a lot of appetite for the feds coming in and shutting down a popular tourist attraction in many cities around the country once the current news cycle ends.
I would hope that some (known) relatively simple and inexpensive quick fixes would at least be made though.
Like most lakes in Missouri, it's impossible to get very far from shore on Table Rock Lake. Our lakes are built by flooding the narrow valleys that streams cut into the limestone and dolomite of the Ozark Plateau. This really just compounds the tragedy, as a boat driver with an ounce of common sense would have just driven up on any available shore when the storm got bad, rather than trying to make it back to the home ramp. I thought that public tour boat operators had to be Coast Guard-approved, but this guy failed pretty hard.
Awesome geography knowledge here! This was fundamentally a weather and engineering issue though. There’s just no way to get to safety when you realize the storm is too much for you in a slow and clumsy craft like this. You have to make the decision not to go out at all if the forecast is potentially dangerous. I’ve never seen weather swells on these small lakes large enough to swamp anything (big speedboat wakes are another story) so I would imagine the wind caught the awning and tipped it enough to take on water. Then the awning drowned everyone when they couldn’t overpower the bouyancy of their jackets to get out from under it. Bad decision by the driver to make the trip caused the accident, and the life-jacket policy combined with the awning design made it fatal.
At its very widest the channel is less than a mile across, so there is less than half a mile to go. Holy crap these things are slow, but apparently that would take less than ten minutes, less if aided by gale-force winds. Did ten minutes pass between "I can't handle this storm" and "oh shit I've killed us all"? Probably!
I heard from reports that the tour employees pointed to them and said they wouldn't be needed.
Then when water started coming on board, reports said, some people stood up (possibly to get the life jackets) but the employees told everyone to stay sitting.
I'm going go all internet badass here and say I hope that I'd be strong enough to have have some harsh words and it would take some physical interaction for me not to get to those jackets.... I've been on the water enough to know how quick stuff can go bad and there's no time to get flotation devices out (not enough) to save most folks after it goes bad.
It's fine to imagine being badass, but remember that families with children and elderly people rode these things. At my most badass I could cut my way through the deathcanopy with my trusty pocketknife and maybe pull one small child to safety before the whole thing went to the bottom. What if there were three children and two old folks sitting near me? What a nightmare! Tour boats operated for the amusement of the general public must not sink quickly, even in choppy water.
Internet badass here again... if I'm there with my kids, that's why I'm being a badass. I'm not sitting in an unstable boat in a storm and not having a jacket on my family...
I understand your experience, but there's plenty of cliff-like terrain that the lake(s) (Table Rock and Lake of the Ozarks) have. In a lot of parts of the lake, there's not a shore to beach on. The speed of these things in the water wouldn't outrun their ability to take on water, either.
Sure there are bluffs. They don't tend to be vertical at water level for a very long distance. Anyway the tragedy occurred within non-motorized-rescue distance of the dock for "The Showboat Branson Belle", which is an area with more gently sloping shores. Here's a view of that area from the north:
If they had started out right next to the dam, they couldn't have driven up onto that, but in that case they would have passed about half a mile of shoreline before sinking.
If this sort of thing happened at Lake of the Ozarks, the main obstacle would be all the lake-home seawalls... CoE regs prevent installation of those amenities at Table Rock. Of course, given the Lake's wealthier/more prestigious clientele, duck rides would never prosper there...
'U.S. Coast Guard spokesman Chad Saylor confirmed that the Missouri duck boat was a “stretch duck.” He said the boat was last inspected on Nov. 29, 2017, and was found “fit for route and service.”'
It is not evident that the [lack of] credentials of the person who designed the vessel contributed to its capsizing. This CNN article goes on to discuss the conditions during the day of the incident[0]
The town was under a severe thunderstorm warning issued about half an hour before the boat capsized.
There were numerous reports of damage throughout the county, including trees down and structural damage, said CNN meteorologist Taylor Ward.
The highest wind gust reported in the area was 63 mph.
"I believe it was caused by weather, yes," said Stone County Sheriff Doug Rader.
Any time you are traveling in a motorized vehicle there is a chance that things turn deadly. Let's allow the investigation to continue before rushing to judgement.
The NTSB investigation for the 1999 sinking of a duck boat has concluded [0]:
> Until reserve buoyancy retrofits are completed the Board recommended immediate actions to mitigate the danger for vessels without adequate reserve buoyancy including the removal of canopies during water operations or installation of a Coast Guard approved canopy that would not restrict the horizontal or vertical escape of passengers; closing unnecessary access plugs; reduction of through-hull penetrations to the minimum size needed for operation; and installation of independently powered electric bilge pumps.
I don't have all the information, but it certainly doesn't look like those recommendations were enacted here.
For clarification, these recommendations were for Duck Boats in general; The entrepreneur in the headline designed a "stretch" duck boat, which was an extended version of a regular one.
This is a strawman - no one is calling for ending the investigation prematurely.
> before rushing to judgement.
How soon is too soon to "rush" to judgement that these boats are unsafe?
The NTSB report regarding the 1999 Arkansas sinking [0] noted problems with their lack of reserve buoyancy. Certainly weather played a factor in the Missouri sinking, but so did the design flaw that causes it to sink or capsize much more easily than a modern boat of equivalent size. That design flaw has been known publicly for almost 20 years.
The passengers who drowned in the Missouri sinking weren't wearing life jackets. [1] The 1999 NTSB report recommended removing the canopies of these boats, but if the canopies couldn't be removed, then they recommended not using life jackets.
And the main subject of the article is the crash from 3 years ago in Seattle. That happened on land, caused by a broken axle. [2] It turns out the person who designed the "stretch" duck boats didn't have any formal engineering training, and it's not a huge step to imagine that stretching a vehicle in that way could lead to increased stress on the axle.
This isn't rushing to judgement. This is understanding the context of decades of previous incidents for better insight into the most recent one.
There are US flotation standards for small boats.[1] That requires big blocks of foam that floats. But amphibious vehicles are excepted. This is a problem.
Amphibious buses [2] are scary. They have flotation, but how stable are they in rough water?
Reminds me of the recent story [1] about that kid who was killed on an amusement park ride designed by some guy with zero credentials. You'd think at some point, someone would have signed off on the engineering design and then on the actual workmanship of the final product, but where do you draw the line?
Too much regulation and certification, and you have the aviation industry, where you can't so much as run a USB charger out to the front panel of your Cessna without the FAA coming down on you like a ton of bricks. Too little and you have people drowning and kids getting their heads accidentally ripped off. Maybe the line should be drawn at the point where you hang your shingle out there and try to make a business out of your invention?
If your cheap Chinese USB charger shorts out and starts a fire in the dash of your Cessna, that is a major issue, and given the rate that Chinese USB chargers do short out, a reasonably significant risk.
The last thing we need is flaming Cessna's dropping out of the sky into heavily populated areas.
> Too much regulation and certification, and you have the aviation industry
Where it's amazingly safe considering it's literally aluminum tubes carrying humans through the air at almost 700 mph? I'm a big fan of what the FAA does.
I feel like this article is a real railroad of the mechanic that "designed" this version of the boat instead of the entire industry that is using military surplus vehicles that shouldn't be used for this purpose. They point out that he got information from other mechanics... in my experience, those guys are some of the best practical engineers out there.
This article is worded like somehow an ivy league education would have fixed that duck boats are a shitty deal. I think that's pointing the finger in the wrong direction.
I would not want to ride in a vehicle designed by someone who has an engineering degree from the Ivy League. It's well known that Ivy League engineering is pretty shitty. I'd trust a room full of Germans... or maybe some people from a engineering powerhouse state school like U of M.
Yeah, I don't agree with that statement either. I also don't think anyone from the ivy league would get into this business based on it's own merits. My original point however wasn't to disparage a classical education in engineering, but just to point out that framing the story as that this man "only" talked to other mechanics about his designs frames his role in the accident as some sort of classist bullshit.
This whole thing is not ideal and needs to maybe be regulated. In my opinion it should be regulated because Duck Tours are a stupid eyesore and anyone who would pile on them doesn't value an actual good time, but that's just me... While the article makes sure to spend several paragraphs railing on the design by a mechanic 30 years back, it doesn't actually put together a graph to quantify duck tour accidents in relation to say accidents on greyhound or megabus. It just says these things have killed people. Great, so do rented party boats.
The conclusion it draws from the first sentence onward is that because this guy didn't go to college that he designed a death trap. He didn't even design the thing. He modified something that the US military built for storming the beaches at Normandy. It's ludicrous.
Anyone who is lucky and driven enough to get a real study in engineering should. They should also build amazing things after! And if they unfortunately kill people, then that should be evaluated on it's merits, but it's just silly to say that this guy didn't take a lot into account and worked with what he had based around safety expectations of the time. His education isn't even nearly the most important thing happening here.
Coming home from work yesterday I observed what is supposedly an identically designed boat on the Charles River in Boston. On flat water, the bow is maybe 2 feet from the water. I know nothing about maritime design but as a recreational boater I can tell these things aren’t safe. At the same time, I’m seeing local officials and news outlets in Boston saying that it’s different here, for some reason.
Pretty much. Anyone who thinks these will be banned relatively casually is... misguided. Boston's not exactly the anti-regulation capital of the universe but there would be a huge backlash against any attempt to ban this incredibly popular tourist attraction.
The exhaust location is really troubling, they are quite low and on the front of the boat. If you watch video from the storm, I can't imagine the exhaust is venting correctly. I also read If the engine goes, the bilge pump doesn't have a backup, so it wouldn't be functioning, and the front was already under water.... Interestingly the DOT says the exhaust should be at the back or above the passenger compartment but The U.S. Coast Guard regulations do not have this rule, so it's not enforced. Looks like this: http://john.je/tCXb // http://john.je/tCU4 // http://john.je/tBdi
If they took away the canopy and made customers wear life jackets, I might actually consider riding in one.
What's the procedure for regulating a national industry like this? The eco-tour companies out here in my state are constantly in fear of being regulated, but that's regulation on the state level, by state agencies. Duck-tours, and duck-tour disasters seem to be all over.
I hesitate to blame it on lack of credentials. Much of engineering history has been made on piles if dead bodies resulting from mistakes made by fully credentialed engineers, even with advanced degrees.
Engineering school does not confer at least two things: common sense and experience. These qualities are independent from academic learning.
If the designer/modifier is found to be at fault it is far more likely to be due to a lack of research and common sense than a lack of schooling.
I mean, building a boat like that that can sink if swamped and traps passengers inside is just plain stupid, degree or not.
Are there any statistics about the fatality rate adjusted for ridership for Duck boats vs cars? There was a fatal crash in Seattle last year[0] involving a Duck boat, but it seems like their fatalities always garner more news than more standard vehicles'.
The "Professional Engineer" designation is super limited and grants some statutory privileges for signing off on public projects, but not much else. The vast majority of engineers behind airplanes and cars are not PEs.
It may be limited but it's not just public projects. When I worked in the offshore drilling business, senior engineers had PEs so they could sign off on drawings submitted to the ABS (American Bureau of Shipping) and perhaps others.
Why should the LA Times keep supporting the EU after GDPR when their financial base is entirely in the US - and the paper's online presence mostly is based on serving ads and retrieving data?
The parent comment was not about the LATimes. Rather that HN would better serve its global audience by linking to stories from other sources that all HN readers can access.
This article is perhaps not news to many, but on its own is damning.
These “boats” (they are not) do not meet basic standards for road nor sea, are furthermore hacked together from scrap, maintained shoddily, and yet receive certifications from all government authorities from which they require inspection in order to operate.
A recurring pattern in media now a days is to give absolutely no context to anecdotal accounts. The article highlights a few anecdotal incidents of accidents. However, it also mentions, implicitly, that these vehicles have been operating for decades and are hugely popular in some areas. So what is the incidence rate? Not mentioned. What is the fatality rate? Not mentioned. How do these rates compare to other vehicles? Of course, not mentioned.
People are rushing to judgement based on a lack of familiarity with an industry and so are extrapolating anecdotal evidence to be more widespread than it likely is given that this article seems to have been searching far and wide to dig up any incidents it could, including even regular roadway crashes in the reporting.
There used to be 2 operators of these things in Britain.
After a series of incidents(fires at sea, sinking) due to shoddy maintainence by poorly resourced bus mechanics and questionable modifications made in a desperate attempt to make them, technically, seaworthy according to modern regulations, they have both shut down. I'm kinda surprised the US still has them in such numbers.
I did some further research here. We've had these commercial duck trip services since 1946 (that company is still in business!). According to the NTSB [1] more than go on tours with more than a million passengers per year as well. That number is probably up since that report was from 1999.
And the only two major incidents at sea have been caused by extreme human error. The 1999 issue was a mechanic leaving a 4.5" access hole to the hull unplugged. And the most recent involved the captain taking the passengers out into a serious storm with 70+ mph winds and 4-6 foot waves. Like most things in the media today this just seems like absurd sensationalism over an event that people can be emotionally exploited to click on lots of stuff about.
They worked well for the very limited purpose for which they were designed: to shuttle troops and supplies to shore. They weren’t designed as a primary transportation mode but as somewhat of a ferry pretty much designed to go one way: from ship to beach. They certainly weren’t designed as tourist attractions to transport children and the infirm — but to transport trained soldiers and marines into battle. They were designed to last long enough to supply beach landing troops in combat.
It’s like using Spitfires to transport school children.
DUKWs performed well enough to stay in US inventory into the Korean war, and France didn't retire theirs until the 80's. Gen Eisenhower called them "one of the most valuable pieces of equipment produced by the United States during the war."
Since they're typically boarded on land, it's kind of a bait and switch, isn't it? On land, one wouldn't notice the insufficient freeboard. One might be less likely to notice how enclosed the passenger compartment is, because at that point it feels more like a bus than a boat. Once the thing plunges down the ramp, one might start getting some bad feelings, but at that point it's pretty much too late. Demanding a return to shore would make one appear wimpy, and would inconvenience one's fellow passengers. The same impulse might have prevented passengers from demanding, once the storm got bad, an immediate shore landing rather than a long cruise to the home ramp. The thing is on wheels, so that would have saved all lives.
This firm does seem to target tourists, who would be less likely than locals to have boating experience.
I can swim, so I'm not overly concerned. I've floated on some questionable conveyances that needed quite a lot of duck tape to make them hold water chasing trout.
Then again, I usually don't bother fishing when there are near hurricane winds forecast. Although I have gone trawling across a pond with two anchors down on multiple occasions...
Whether you can swim or not isn't really the issue. The issue is that they are retrofitted with enclosures that make it difficult to escape, and once they start taking on water they can sink in seconds.
Can you provide an image? Every image I've been able to find has enormous and open windows that seem specifically enabled to allow people to escape outside them in an emergency. I've attached a few random images below.
In the video still of the duck that sank (not one from some other place), you can see that there is at least some obstruction (it may just be plastic sheet though):
I think it's a bit much to ask a group of tourists that includes children, the elderly, possibly the disabled, all not wearing life jackets, to evacuate out the windows into open water as the ceiling comes down on them. That's not something you can reasonably expect to happen in a matter of seconds.
Sure, but that's not the issue right? These things have apparently been running for decades and are hugely popular in some areas. This article seems to have tried to drag up every single incident it could that involved them, even including random normal traffic collisions. But relative to length and frequency of usage, there weren't many incidents.
Put another way these things seem to be incredibly safe on average, but certainly when something goes wrong it's going to be make for good headlines because it's so awful. But beyond that, it seems like even when something does go wrong you certainly have good chances if you're a decent swimmer. Though perhaps this incident would be an exception, it looks like they were out in the water during a serious storm - which is completely idiotic in any sort of small water boat.
Read the NTSB report from 1999. They recommend the canopies be removed because the boats can sink in as little as 15 seconds. They ride very low in the water and there are multiple reports of canopies pulling people under.
Most of them have windows or plastic sheeting that can (and was in the Missouri case) be closed in the case of rain or cold weather.
The coast guard also recommends not wearing life jackets while inside because in one documented inncident people wearing life jackets floated to the top and got stuck under the canopy.
You need to consider rates for things. "Multiple reports" means absolutely nothing when you're talking about something that's been running for decades for one can only imagine how many total millions of hours or whatever other metric you want to use.
For instance you can find that thousands of people have been killed because of seat belts or air bags. But these things don't really matter because the rate of incidence is extremely low. Perhaps also a bad example on my part as they also save lives when they work, but you can pick practically anything -- given a large enough sample, you'll find people manage to die to just about everything. My favorite is Isadora Duncan - a celebrity, no less! So the key question is what is the incident rate here? Given the most condemning data we have is "multiple reports" over 2 decades, that sounds like a pretty good baseline for 'extremely safe.'
----
Also, can you please provide evidence of even just a single duck boat with windows? I just tried pretty hard to find even a single one, and failed. But yeah, velcro or drop sheets are of course part of the system. And again those are designed to be able to be rapidly removed.
>Given the most condemning data we have is "multiple reports" over 2 decades, that sounds like a pretty good baseline for 'extremely safe.'
The most condemning data we as armchair sleuths have is that the NTSB who did have all the data on incident rates opened an investigation in 1999. They concluded that the boats weren't safe. They recommended that they be retrofitted with reserve buoyancy, that electric bill pumps be installed (so that bilge pumps keep working when the engine is swamped), and that the canopies be removed or replaced with coast guard approved canopies that allow for easy escape.
>Also, can you please provide evidence of even just a single duck boat with windows? I just tried pretty hard to find even a single one, and failed. But yeah, velcro or drop sheets are of course part of the system. And again those are designed to be able to be rapidly removed.
Those were on the Missouri boat that sank. They can be electronically raised and lowered by the captain [1]. They don't look like they are easy to remove without the captain raising them. From watching video taken inside, they don't appear to be held on by something easy to remove like velcro.
According to eye witness reports they weren't able to easily escape through the windows.
"Keller said her daughter made it clear that the canopy was on and the windows were sealed."
"They were all closed," Keller said her daughter told her. "The windows were closed and the top was on."
"It was so hard to get out of the boat, Mom. It was so hard to get out of the boat."[2]
I increasingly feel like I'm playing Where's Waldo when it comes to digging out facts in between appeals to emotion in media articles. Your articles confirm that the "windows" are plastic curtains which one individual described as being difficult for children or elderly to open. The canopy was also detachable, and was detached, during the incident. And before diverging too much, the point I was getting at here is that these incidents seem to be extremely rare relative to the usage of these vehicles.
And (at risk of hijacking my own point, again) in this case the major problem was not the boat itself, but a captain bringing his passengers out into a very severe storm - with possible wind speeds in excess of 60 mph in the exact lake they were going into. And the warning was released before they even entered the water. That's enough to wreck any small water vehicle. And the captain also did not tell the passengers to put on their life vests even when telling them this was the worst storm he'd ever seen. He probably did not want to start a panic but, at least in hindsight, that was another bad judgement call on his part. It'll be up to the courts to decide if that judgement entered into the realm of negligence.
>Described as being difficult for children or elderly to open.
That part was a paraphrase of what he said. You ignored the next part which was a direct quote: the windows would "prevent you from even trying to get out. You need to swim toward the back of the boat. But there being 30-plus people in there, I could just ... just all the chaos happening in there I think it would be difficult to calmly line up and go out the back."
He's not talking about just children and elderly when he mentions people calmly lining up and going out the back.
Look at the plastic sheeting. They are raised and lowered electronically and the sheets take up an entire side of the boat. Nothing about them looks well designed to allow quick escape in an emergency.
>These incidents seem to be extremely rare relative to the usage of these vehicles.
You don't know that at all. You have no idea how often they are are used or how many of them are operating. You don't have the information say whether they are more or less dangerous than other tour boats.
You know who does have this information, the NTSB. Their conclusion is that they are unsafe and should be heavily modified.
>And the captain also did not tell the passengers to put on their life vests
The coast guard doesn't recommend wearing life vest while under a canopy because if the boat goes down the vest can pin you under the canopy. In the 1999 sinking they found 4 people with life vests stuck under the canopy.
> The canopy was also detachable, and was detached,
This article and pictures I've seen of the recovered boat indicates that it wasn't actually detached, "The boat appeared largely intact with holes in its canvas top.." It looks like it either ripped or a few flaps were opened in it.
A private inspector who inspected the boats for the company that owns them last year even warned the company about how dangerous they were. He inspected 20 of them and thought they were too dangerous. He said: "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."
You can estimate the usage of these duckboats (and thus their relative safely) pretty easily. These boats have been running for decades and they're described as hugely popular with numerous companies offering duckboat rides throughout the country in various areas with individual boats giving 6+ hours of tours each day. Even at the absolute rock bottom, you're easily way into the millions of hours of operation. And this LATimes piece seemed to try to dig up every single incident they could given they were even reporting random traffic collisions, and there just weren't many relative to this bottom end of the scale.
I understand it can be difficult to find facts between all the emotional drivel, but your own article (second one) states, "the captain had a moment of clarity and was able to release the canopy." Of course they could just be writing whatever they feel like, which is another increasingly common trend in media, but this is a rather specific fact.
There is no way to get useful data from that. 80 boats being used all over the country for 6+ hours in a few places with an average of 3 hours per day across all boats for 20 years, fits your descriptions.
Automobile fatility rate is 1.25 per 100 million miles. Assuming a high average of 50 mph (to convert to deaths per hour), all those assumptions would put DUKWs at about 40 times more fatalities per hour than cars (over the last 20 years).
Maybe there are 160 boats and they really drive 6 hours per day average, that's still 10 times deadlier per hour than cars.
Tour boats and tour buses, which we should be comparing them to are much safer than cars. How is that comparison?
But none of this matters because we don't have accurate estimates, the NTSB does, and they have experts who evaluated the boats and found them unsafe.
I don't care what a news report says. The NTSB report is all the evidence I need unless I see other more compelling evidence to the contrary.
I doubt those lowballs were your first picks for the numbers here, but nonetheless I respect that you put forth some elbow grease so I'll reciprocate by grabbing some better data. The first Duck Tour business started in 1946 [1] - they're still in business. You can read the NTSB report on the 1999 incident here [2]. The PDF (on the right side panel) has far more information. It includes information such as each year having more than 250 ducks transport more than a million passengers on tours averaging 90 minutes. It's reasonable to assume that that number has been increasing over time, but the millions in the 90s at least gives you a decent ballpark. And so like I expect you were finding with more reasonable estimates, these vehicles are hardly dangerous.
And the NTSB also did not find the boats themselves unsafe, though that they could be made to be safer in case of accidents. They stated the cause of the accident was "inadequate maintenance." The other issues, which the media is obsessing on today, were listed as contributing to the magnitude of the incident, not causes of the incident. The cause then, like now, was human error. The 1999 boat was sent out to sea with with a 4.5" hull access plug removed. The mechanic, who was new to the job, forgot to put it back in. The operator did nothing to evacuate the craft, and so on.
>having more than 250 ducks transport more than a million passengers
That wasn't the number for DUKWs that was the number for all amphibious passenger vehicles.
>It's reasonable to assume that that number has been increasing over time
That's really a reasonable assumption considering the vehicles are 70+ years old.
>but the millions in the 90s at least gives you a decent ballpark
Again that's all amphibious vehicles, nothing about DUKWs, but let's assume they are.
1 million passengers. The DUKW in Missouri had 30 passengers, so let's assume the average trip is half full. 1 million passengers / 15 ~= 67k trips * 1.5 hours per trip ~= 100k hours per year.
There have about 40 fatalities caused by DUKWs in the last 20 years. 100k hours * 20 years = 2 million hours.
20 deaths per million hours operated
For cars we have ~0.625 deaths per million hours operated.
32 times more deadly per hour. Remarkably close to my first estimate.
Your #1 link estimates that there are 300 operational DUKWs in the US today. That's going to include reserves that are only operating during busy seasons/weekends etc... But let's assume they are all active for 6 hours per day on average (which is way too high). You still get a fatality rate per hour about 5 times higher than cars.
And again, tour boats and tour buses are much safer than cars, so the comparison will be much worse.
>And the NTSB also did not find the boats themselves unsafe
They did. Here is their recommendation:
“Without delay, alter your amphibious passenger vessels to provide reserve buoyancy through passive means, such as watertight compartmentalization, builtin flotation, or equivalent measures, so that they will remain afloat and upright in the event of flooding, even when carrying a full complement of passengers and
crew.”
“The Safety Board considers that the major consideration in
assessing the ability of passengers to
escape from a sinking DUKW is the overhead
canopy.”
>The other issues, which the media is obsessing on today, were listed as contributing to the magnitude of the incident, not causes of the incident.
Of course they aren't the cause. A canopy isn't going to cause a boat to sink.
These vehicles have been operating since 1946. That's 72 years, not 20. The reason I gave you the hours and population is because you then figure out 'person hours' without having to make any assumptions other than average rate of travel to go from deaths/mile to deaths/hour - which I expect is a stat you can actually probably also find out.
This was the NTSB's conclusion on the accident.
"The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the flooding and sinking of the DUKW No.1 was a missing access plug, which, in turn, was caused by inadequate supervision of company personnel and inadequate management oversight of amphibious passenger vehicle maintenance. Contributing to the sinking was a flaw in the design of DUKWs, that is, the lack of adequate reserve buoyancy that would have allowed the vehicle to remain afloat in a flooded condition."
The accident was not caused because the vehicles were unsafe. It was caused because of human error. The things you're talking about are factors that contributed to the sinking. Without the main problem (human error) there would be no problem. And, lo and behold, human error was also the cause in this most recent incident as well.
>These vehicles have been operating since 1946. That's 72 years, not 20
I only have fatalities for the last 20 years if that wasn't clear. If you want to go back into non-digitized local newspaper archives across the country to find out if there were any other deaths as well as try to figure out how many were operating 70 years ago, be my guest.
That doesn't change that fact that over the last 20 years, DUKWs are much deadlier per hour than cars, and it's even worse when compared to buses and tour boats.
>The reason I gave you the hours and population is because you then figure out 'person hours'
Fine. 1.5 million person hours * 20 years = 30 million person hours
40 deaths / 30 million person hours = ~1.3 deaths per million person hours
The best answer I can find for how long the Average America spends in a car per day times number of drivers times days give me 199,685 million person hours per year, and 37k vehicle fatalities last year = 37k/199685 = 0.19 deaths per million person hours
About 6 times deadlier.
Tour boats and buses are much safer than cars so adjust accordingly. In the UK (only place I could find the data in hours) water transportation has 50 deaths per billion hours. 0.05 deaths per million person hours, Making DUKWs 26 times deadlier than the average UK passenger boat.
>The accident was not caused because the vehicles were unsafe. It was caused because of human error. The things you're talking about are factors that contributed to the sinking. Without the main problem (human error) there would be no problem.
This is completely meaningless. Human error is the cause of almost all traffic accidents as well, yet some cars are still unsafe because of the behavior of the car once human error takes place.
Assume that the NTSB finds that a defect in a new bus called the Explodo will trap all it's occupants inside and cause it to catch fire in the event the driver hits an obstacle at greater than 20 miles per hour. Are you going to argue that the NTSB isn't really saying the bus is unsafe because human error is necessary to trigger the defect? No you're not.
Look, I get it. You pride yourself on making evidence based judgments. However, in this case you did some quick math and misjudged the danger, but now you're digging in and sticking to an indefensible position. You're letting your emotions influence your position--behaving exactly like the journalists you were original railing against.
The LA Times hit piece on this issue went so far as to dig up random traffic incidents involving these vehicles. If there were significant fatal accidents before 1999 - especially if the fault lay with the vehicles' design, they would have dug them up. So it's safe to assume there were none.
Your numbers on person hours for us drivers is far off. Keep in mind that a total of about 3.2 trillion miles are driven per year. 199.685 trillion person hours would give an average base rate of travel of 0.016 miles per hour. Obviously you need to multiply that by the average number of occupants per vehicle, but even if you say there are 10 occupants you're looking at 0.16 miles per hour on average so it looks like you missed some decimal points.
Your explodo example is not really reasonable. We know here for a fact that these things have transported tens of millions of people. And they've also been in operation for millions of hours. There's way more than enough of a sample for lots of things to have gone wrong. Yet of all the incidents that have happened in these millions of hours, and the likely 40,000,000+ people that have used these vehicles, we only had 2 severe accidents - both caused by extreme human incompetence. So you're left with two choices, neither of which I expect you'd really like:
- Accidents practically never happen.
- Accidents do happen at a normal frequency, but in nearly all cases the outcome is completely safe.
>If there were significant fatal accidents before 1999 - especially if the fault lay with the vehicles' design, they would have dug them up. So it's safe to assume there were none.
That's not even remotely safe to assume. You can't seriously think the LA times has the manpower to comb through 70 years of non-digitized records and local newspaper stories for 1 article.
Since they included traffic incidents after 1999, and you think they went through 70 years of data. Why no traffic incidents before 1999? The simplest explanation is that they only included what they could find using digital records that were easy to access.
> looks like you missed some decimal points.
I looked it over and the data is just wrong. It was based on self reported data, and it looks like people just over report the amount of time they spend in cars.
Since there is no way to accurately calculate person hours for cars. I'll just refer you back to the estimation based on operating hours.
Or you can compare it to the person hour safety data for passenger boats in the UK. Either way based on my estimations, DUKWs are likely statistically much more dangerous.
But who cares. I'm just some guy on the interne with very limited access to the relevant data. You don't need to take my word for it.
The NTSB found that the boats were unsafe. Their recommendation to New York and Wisconsin was that they require DUKWs to be modified or cease operations. Their recommendation was that unmodified DUKWs are too dangerous to continue carrying passengers.
>Your explodo example is not really reasonable.
So you agree that safety flaws that magnify human error can make a vehicle unsafe? Because it seemed like you were arguing the opposite for the last several posts.
>And they've also been in operation for millions of hours. There's way more than enough of a sample for lots of things to have gone wrong. Yet of all the incidents that have happened in these millions of hours, and the likely 40,000,000+ people that have used these vehicles, we only had 2 severe accidents - both caused by extreme human incompetence. So you're left with two choices, neither of which I expect you'd really like:
This entire paragraph is an appeal to emotion. You've disguised it by throwing in some very dubious numbers that you have no way of verifying. Your argument essentially boils down to: We've had lots of people ride our boats and only a couple really bad accidents--that means they're safe.
The rational way to judge their safety is to compare the fatality rate to other vehicles, and in the absence of the ability to accurately do this, defer to a trusted expert. But you just want to focus on what feels right to you.
The NTSB thinks that they are dangerous, back of the envelope math shows they are probably more dangerous than other vehicles. Just admit that your gut reaction was wrong in this one case.
40 million assumes that in the 50 years prior to 1999 average usage was less than 400k per year. Going from 0 in 1946 to 1 million in 1999 with nothing but a linear increase would of course be 500k per year on average. My number was more than 20% below that. It was intentionally an extremely conservative estimate. I do not believe that you believe that organizations such as the LA Times and NY Times are incapable of digging up incident reports in the decades before 1999 - that's cognitive dissonance.
And on that note, I feel as though you're projecting here. The numbers we've come up for here look okayish even when you are making crazy assumptions like pretending these things never existed before 1999, or were using some rather creative math to get that person hours estimate. Reality is rather friendlier, meaning these numbers are going to go from "okayish" to something substantially better. The reason we were interested in the rates was not to prove they are safer than cars, but to show that when you look at the incident rates that these calls for bans on them are grossly sensationalistic and emotional. I'm not sure what level of accident rate does make one start pondering a ban, but we're obviously not even in the remotely right ballpark for that sort of discussion.
The NTSB investigates literally thousands of incidents, offers probable cause and solutions where available. The presence of solutions that could lessen the dangers of catastrophic failure is not the same thing as the boats themselves being unsafe. For instance, if I were to locate a report from the NTSB proposing some form of vehicular regulation or another, would you then insist that all vehicles are unsafe, simply for the fact that they could be made more safe? I would not have to search long, as you can see from their reports [1] yourself.
> Going from 0 in 1946 to 1 million in 1999 with nothing but a linear increase would of course be 500k per year on average. My number was more than 20% below that. It was intentionally an extremely conservative estimate.
Here's another example of why these extrapolations are useless without real data.
1. There is absolutely nothing that would allow you to say with any confidence whatsoever what the growth curve looked like. Maybe it was quadratic and there were only a million from 1946 to 1998. From looking at the history of the original Wisconsin Ducks, it looks like they operated with only a handful of DUKWs for decades. Maybe they stayed small until bigger companies got involved and spread to multiple cities in only a few years before 1999? You don't know, which is why trying to use numbers before 1999 is useless.
Exponential growth is a very likely explanation for the appearance of an increase in fatalities over the last 20 years (Vehicle aging and easier access to modern records are others)
2. The 1 million number you keep quoting was for all amphibious tourist vehicles, not only DUKWs. There were other amphibious vehicles in operation in 1999, and there are more now. There is no breakdown for the number of riders by vehicle type. Given that newer purpose built vehicles are more expensive, they are more likely to be used in high traffic areas thus they are likely to carry a higher than expected proportion of the total riders.
3. These vehicles are now over 70 years old. It is entirely possible that there are fewer of them in operation than there were in 1999.
>I do not believe that you believe that organizations such as the LA Times and NY Times are incapable of digging up incident reports in the decades before 1999 - that's cognitive dissonance.
Do you think there were zero safety incidents involving DUKWs before 1999? You stated they included recent traffic incidents. If they were going back through 70 years of records, why didn't they include any previous traffic incidents? The most likely explanation is that they found the low hanging fruit and didn't bother going back any further.
There were 4 days between the incident and the report you mention. What kind of world are you living in where a newspaper has the resources to comb through 70 years of local news reports and accident reports from every relevant municipality for 1 article in 4 under days.
>crazy assumptions like pretending these things never existed before 1999
This is absurd. We clearly lack data to make accurate estimations from before 1999. We can try to look at the fatality rate over the last 20 years, or we can spend time arguing over why we can't find 70 year old accident reports from a small hamlet in Wisconsin over the internet.
> Reality is rather friendlier, meaning these numbers are going to go from "okayish" to something substantially better...I'm not sure what level of accident rate does make one start pondering a ban, but we're obviously not even in the remotely right ballpark for that sort of discussion.
I think that 26 times deadlier per hour than UK passenger boats warrants looking into it, but I'm not the expert. The experts issued a report though. And it recommended banning unmodified DUKWs.
>grossly sensationalistic and emotional
I think you're the one projecting here. The NTSB called for a ban on unmodified vehicles. Newspaper reporters parroting the NTSB experts can hardly be called sensational.
>more safe
Your misreading of the NTSB report is incredibly frustrating. The NTSB issued a recommendation that operators immediately make heavy modifications. They then made recommendations to state governments that they ban unmodified vehicles. If you read the report they sent communications back and forth with dozens of individual operators begging them to make these modifications.
Here's an excerpt: "THE AMPHIBIOUS VESSELS ARE SUBJECT TO SINKING AND A TRAGEDY LIKE THE ONE THAT OCCURRED IN ARKANSAS COULD BE REPEATED. ACCORDINGLY, THE SAFETY BOARD REQUESTS THAT THE WISCONSIN DUCKS RECONSIDER THEIR POSITION ON THIS MATTER AND CONSIDER TAKING THE REQUESTED ACTION. PENDING FURTHER REPLY FROM THE WISCONSIN DUCKS, M-00-5 HAS BEEN CLASSIFIED "OPEN--UNACCEPTABLE RESPONSE." IN THE INTEREST OF ACCURACY, YOUR LETTER REFLECTS PERCEPTIONS OF THE EXPERIENCE LEVEL OF OUR MARINE STAFF AND SAFETY BOARD - U.S. COAST GUARD RELATIONS THAT ARE NOT FACTUAL. SHOULD WISCONSIN DUCKS WISH TO DISCUSS THESE ISSUES, MY MARINE STAFF CAN BE CONTACTED AT (202) 314-6450."
Nothing about the report or subsequent communication is indicative of an opinion that the boats are safe but that they could be made "more safe." A reasonable, rational person would read the NTSB be report as a proclamation that unmodified DUKWs are unsafe.
The mental gymnastics you have to go through to read that report and take from it that these vehicles are safe for passengers is truly, spectacularly, amazing.
> "A U.S. Coast Guard investigation concurred, warning that enclosed duck boats presented a basic safety problem involving life preservers: If passengers put on life preservers while inside a sinking duck boat, they might float upward and drown after getting trapped beneath the canopy; but if passengers escape the duck boat without life preservers, they might drown in open water."
> "In the days after the accident, Jamie Bray and other operators tried to defend the practice of not requiring passengers to wear lifejackets by explaining they make escape harder in an enclosed boat. That’s nonsense, says Giesbrecht. He’s conducted a study where people wearing flotation coats are plunged into water: “The assumption is this will hinder their ability to escape the sinking car.” It “really doesn’t.” "
The intersection of tourist attractions and entrepreneurs winging it when it comes to engineering and safety reminds me to the recent Verruckt incident in Kansas:
In this case, the near hurricane force winds are likely the largest contributing factor to the capsizing of the boat. A perfectly engineered boat, if not engineered for hurricane force winds, would also likely capsize. Weather can be hard to predict, but there were warnings issued and someone obviously 1) wasn't aware of the warning 2) ignored the warning or 3) thought the boat would be back in time before the winds kicked up. Breaking t-cells can make a calm day turn really quickly.
And presumably someone in government (in a lot of places) signed off on transporting people in these.
Yes, someone with more experience and even professionally licensed should probably have signed off on the mods. But no one OKing this service required it and it's not clear the modifications were responsible for what happened or it was just something that can happen when duck boats generally are operated in the way that they're operated.