Disregarding safety

When investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board arrive at the scene, you know at least two things right off: there has been a tragedy, and humans could have prevented it.

This latest disaster, on the waters of Table Rock Lake near the Missouri tourist town, Branson, is just stunning to me.

31 people got on the Ride the Ducks Branson amphibious vessel as a storm approached, and then a thunderstorm came along, swamping the boat. The boat sank and only 14 of those passengers survived.

Predictably, Jim Pattison Jr, president of the parent company for Ride the Ducks Branson, said the storm “came out of nowhere.”

But it did not come out of nowhere.  The storm was literally on the radar for hours last Thursday, but the boat company either did not pay attention to the meteorologists who had been tracking the storm for hours, giving all hands plenty of time and warning, OR they received the warning and said the devil with it, let's take a chance and not miss out on the revenue.

I would be horrified to find the latter to be true.  But who knows?

“[T]his indirect blaming of meteorologists was old a decade ago and is completely inappropriate in this particular situation,” blogged Mike Smith, a retired meteorologist and former AccuWeather executive. 

The National Weather Service issued a severe thunderstorm watch, predicting conditions favorable for dangerous storms in the region, at 11:20 a.m. That was almost eight hours before the storm arrived. Included in the watch was the caution of  “widespread damaging winds likely with isolated significant gusts to 75 mph possible.”

The NTSB is investigating, and say it might take as long as a year to get all the facts.

In the meantime comes information from people who know of such things that these duck boats were built to be amphibious military landing crafts, not a conveyance for almost three dozen people on a pleasure cruise. Their very construction makes them easy to breach, and the canopy on top, so helpful in keeping the sun and rain off the riders, serves to trap people aboard a sinking duck boat.

The saddest thing of all, and I know I harp on this every summer, is that people boarding the duck were told they would not need life preservers. The Law, in its infinite wisdom, does not require them.

And one of the people who left shore in a boat from the marina to try to rescue these 17 souls said that when he got to the site of the accident, there was nothing there at all...except for life jackets, unused, ironically floating on the lake.