State suspends amphibious truck tour service after Seattle crash
By Eric M. Johnson
SEATTLE (Reuters) - A Washington state commission suspended an amphibious tour service operator in Seattle on Monday while it investigates last week's crash with a charter bus carrying international students in which five people died, an official said.
Thursday's crash between the Ride the Ducks truck and the bus on Seattle's Aurora Bridge also sent about 50 people to hospitals.
The collision increased scrutiny on the duck boats, which carry tourists on tours and have been involved in a number of deadly crashes in recent years.
Washington state's Utilities and Transportation Commission suspended all Ride the Ducks operations in the state, said spokeswoman Amanda Maxwell. The company had already suspended its tours.
Atlanta-based Ride the Ducks International, which refurbishes the World War Two-era trucks, told its customers the housing around the axle was a potential failure point and recommended repairs and increased monitoring, National Transportation Safety Board member Earl Weener said on Sunday.
Weener also said the left front axle of the amphibious vehicle was sheared off, but it was unclear how that occurred. Early indications suggest the axle was sheared off before the collision, another NTSB official said.
A possible fix would have been to weld collars around the shaft, Weener said, adding the vehicle in Thursday's crash did not receive recommended repairs and that it was unclear whether the Seattle franchise received the warning from Ride the Ducks International in 2013.
Ride the Ducks International said in a statement on Monday it recommended front axle housing repair for 57 Duck vehicles in 2013 and "had no reason to believe that Seattle had not complied with the bulletin."
Ride the Ducks of Seattle, an independently owned licensee that bought the refurbished vehicle in 2005, said: "We are working to understand what happened, and have completely opened our operations to NTSB investigators."
The U.S. Army-surplus vehicle that crashed was built in 1945 and refurbished in 2005, Weener said, adding there were about 100 similar trucks in service nationwide.
Students killed in the crash were from Austria, Indonesia, Japan and China, North Seattle College said in a statement. A 20-year-old student, the fifth victim, died on Sunday, a hospital said.
The accident came nearly five months after an amphibious sightseeing vehicle fatally struck a woman on a Philadelphia street. In 2010, two tourists were killed when a tugboat pushed a barge into a similar vehicle, also in Philadelphia.
(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Daniel Wallis and Peter Cooney)
