“I felt like if I was able to get a life jacket I could’ve saved my babies,” Tia Coleman said in her latest bedside interview. By now, her name is likely a household word–at least for boaters like myself. Mrs. Coleman and a 13-year-old nephew were among the sole survivors of a family of 11, including her husband and three children, in the tragic sinking of a Ride the Ducks tour boat. A total of 31 passengers and crew were lost in a horrific storm on the Table Rock Lake near Branson, Missouri on the evening of July 20. A few days later, as I pace the dock at the Deer Harbor Marina here in the San Juan Islands of Washington State, I watch youngsters frolic on the decks wearing life jackets–even on the dock. I am filled with grief for those lost in a tragic sinking. Life jackets are such an integral part of boating safety that the newer ones are streamlined and colorful fashion statements with the sort of panache that encourages their use. Our local marina also maintains a dock-side stash of bulky orange loaners offered to anyone who needed a life preserver for some impromptu outing. A Duck boat such as the one the Coleman family rode in is an amphibious truck–modeled on a DUCK military vehicle originally built to haul support equipment for the Normandy invasion in World War II. Military style DUCK vessels are still in use in some ten nations.
Although modifications have been made to stabilize these boats for recreational use, a Duck is not so seaworthy in the freakish storm that arose as if from nowhere. Winds were clocked at 73 mph, and have been described as “straight line,” as opposed to the circular pattern of a tornado, swamping the Duck vessel in a pair of four-foot waves.
The vessel the Coleman family rode was one of a pair of Ducks that headed out on a 60-minute tour in the face of a National Weather Service storm warning issued around noon, or so Mrs. Coleman recalled. Ride the Duck vessels are equipped with life jackets of all sizes as decreed by maritime law, and passengers were informed the jackets were above their heads. However, the captain of the vessel remarked that life jackets wouldn’t be needed, or so Mrs. Coleman said. We have yet to hear anything but condolences from the Ride the Ducks concession, which has a safety record extending back some forty years. And it is true that storm warnings are notoriously unreliable, as anyone who has faced hurricane or tornado warnings well knows. Nevertheless, “It is hard for anyone wearing a life jacket to drown,” was a bystander’s laconic observation, and I have to agree. A second warning for Table Rock Lake was issued around 6:30 p.m. One Duck did survive, while the other immediately began taking on water, suggesting the possible failure of a bilge pump.
As Mrs. Coleman recalled, the passengers were advised to remain in their seats. Perhaps the ride was so rough by then that anyone reaching overhead for a life jacket might well be injured or even thrown from the vessel. Maritime law leaves the judgment of the vessel operator as to when to urge passengers to don life jackets. When the facts are in, the scores of unused life jackets buried in 40 feet of water along with what remains of the unlucky Duck will make the case as Mrs. Coleman sees it. Until the facts prove otherwise, I share her grief and her stoic recrimination. As the Ducks turned tail and headed for shore, some 30 minutes elapsed before the vessel the Colemans were riding in was swamped and sunk. Was this not time enough to warn passengers to put on their life jackets?