Federal Agency Warned about Danger of Duck Boat Canopies before Table Rock Tragedy
The Kansas City Star
A park ranger patrols near where a duck boat capsized the night before resulting in at least 13 deaths on Table Rock Lake in Branson, Missouri.
Thursday’s sinking of a duck boat on choppy waters at Table Rock Lake in southwest Missouri bears similarities to a 1999 lake disaster in Arkansas.
In 1999, the Miss Majestic duck boat rapidly sank to the bottom of Lake Hamilton, drowning 13 of its 21 passengers.
When investigators recovered the boat, they found seven dead passengers still inside — four of them pinned against the underside of the canopy, which made the prospects for an escape unlikely.
The National Transportation Safety Board investigated the Arkansas incident and arrived at this conclusion: “Contributing to the high loss of life was a continuous canopy roof that entrapped passengers within the sinking vehicle.”
The boat takes on the long and narrow shape of a bus. A canopy serves as a roof.
“It’s sort of like getting out of an airplane,” Robert Mongeluzzi, a Philadelphia attorney who has brought lawsuits against duck boat operators, told the Star on Friday. “This is not an open-sided boat where everybody can just pitch themselves over the side readily.”
Experts say the presence of a canopy or other coverings on duck boats, which ride low to the water, creates undue difficulty for passengers trying to escape if the vessel sinks below the surface, whether they have life preservers or not.
“The problem with canopies is that if you are wearing your life preserver and there is a canopy and the boat capsizes then, the floatation device will take you up in the canopy, pinning you inside the vessel,” Mongeluzzi said. “If you don’t wear your life preserver, then you don’t have the floatation to get to the surface if the boat sinks.”
Thursday’s incident is the latest in a string of high-profile deaths involving duck boats, originally designed for military use in World War II. Distinctive for their ability to travel on water or on land, they have since become vehicles used on lake tours.
The boat that capsized Thursday was owned by a company called Ride The Ducks, which court records indicate originated in Branson before developing a national profile.
The company has been involved in some of these tragedies. In 2016, the company abandoned its operations in Philadelphia after two separate incidents resulted in three deaths.
After the Miss Majestic sank on May 1, 1999, the NTSB found that the continuous canopy roof — the very thing intended to protect passengers from the weather — contributed to the high loss of life. There were other factors, too.
“In some ways, the life jackets may have made it more difficult because they can potentially cause a person to be forced up against an enclosed area,” Gary Haupt, a retired captain with the former Missouri Water Patrol who used to oversee the Table Rock area, said Friday morning. “That would make it more difficult to escape when the boat is going down.”
“All but one of the survivors stated that the canopy was an impediment to their escape,” the NTSB report said. “One man said, ‘If you had the cover (canopy) off, everybody would have had a chance.’ With that cover on, there’s too many people didn’t have a chance because that thing (the Miss Majestic) sank so quick.”