Duck boat

[Carruthers]

The reports of this tragedy jogged my memory about a couple of incidents with Duck Boats in the UK in recent years.
A quick search revealed that there had been three not two as I had first thought.

Incidents involving two Duck amphibious passenger vehicles in which one sank and the other caught fire highlighted extremely poor maintenance and a failure to meet standards, an accident investigation chief has said.

It was “extremely fortunate” that none of the 33 passengers and crew on board the Duck vehicle Wacker Quacker 1, formally known as a DUKW, was drowned or injured when it sank in Salthouse Dock in Liverpool on 15 June 2013, said the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) chief inspector, Steve Clinch.

In the second incident, when the London-based Duck Cleopatra caught fire on the river Thames in London on 29 September 2013, the 28 passengers and two crew had to jump into the water and were rescued by other vessels without serious injury.

In a joint report into both incidents published on Wednesday, the MAIB said that the Wacker Quacker 1, whose passengers either swam ashore or were recovered by other crafts’ crews, was the second Duck vehicle to sink in Salthouse Dock in a three-month period.

The report said that on both occasions the Ducks did not have the quantity of buoyancy foam required to provide the mandated level of residual buoyancy.

Clinch said it became clear that other DUKWs operating in the UK also did not have the quantities of foam required and that focus had shifted to ensuring that these amphibious passenger vehicles would float when flooded.

The Cleopatra’s operators, London Duck Tours, made buoyancy amendments. But Clinch explained that in the case of Cleopatra the “foam was so tightly packed around machinery that it caught fire, resulting in 30 passengers and crew needing to rapidly abandon the vehicle into the Thames”.

The Guardian