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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

Isn't the Coast Guard also involved, it being a water craft used for hire?

Who has the authority to ban these boats?

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.

It's a bit harsh to want to end the whole industry, no?

By all means let's get some proper safety standards for these things, but banning them outright seems excessive.

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.

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.

I suspect that would help a lot. Literal capsizing would still be an issue but filling up with water and sinking would be much less of one.

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:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/duc...

From a 2016 news article:

  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."

(http://www.philly.com/philly/business/396220791.html)

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.

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.

I don't think the original purpose was to be able to behave like a boat, more for fording deeper rivers in combat situations.

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.

We certainly can't let a little death get in the way of profit now can we?

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.

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.

[0] https://youtu.be/6Tv1EBb-MqE?t=425

Err... pretty much every monohull sailboat ever manufactured will "sink immediately" if the hull is punctured. Keels are heavy.

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.

This thread is like a parody

You started this subthread by comparing 30+ passenger commercial amphibious vessels with sub-20' dinghies. Nonsense begets nonsense.

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 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.

Hmmmmm. And here I was thinking Ride the Ducks could be fun, and a friend recommended it to me some while ago...

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:

> 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 like every law should include the reason why it came to exist.

People stop dying from it (because the regulation) therefore it’s not needed.

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.

If only Claire (or one of her "unaffiliated" super-PACs) could somehow blame this on something Josh did during his 1.5 years as AG...

These are not great on the road either. There was a massive accident a couple years ago in Seattle which killed 4 students.

https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/24/us/seattle-tour-bus-duck-tour...

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.

> 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.

If this isn’t a good time for a regulator to intervene, when is?

Also depends on how you use them. Should they have been that far out in the water? etc.

Yeah the canopies seem like death traps :(

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.

Oh man they didn't just head to shore? :( ... even a sand bar or something would have helped, getting stuck even fine!

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!

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Table+Rock+Lake/

"Then the awning drowned everyone when they couldn’t overpower the bouyancy of their jackets to get out from under it."

Unfortunately, I heard reports that, no one had life jackets on.

So many bad choices.

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:

https://www.google.com/maps/@36.6044492,-93.3119691,3a,75y,2...

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...

From the article:

'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.”'

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