Blogocentric Formulations

This Just In - July 22

Ban duck boat tours, says former NTSB chairman after fatal Branson sinking  
Written as part of "This Just In..."   for "Blog Harbor from The Talent Pond" 

What happened to that duck boat tour in Branson, Missouri was a tragedy. Losing seventeen people to an overturned boat is devastating, just as it was in 1999 when a duck boat in Arkansas capsized and killed thirteen individuals. What got me about this article, though, was that former NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) chairman Jim Hall immediately goes one extreme end of the spectrum and says there should be a public safety ban on them across the board.

To be fair, there are a lot about duck boats to be worried about. Since they're a hybrid between a watercraft and an automobile, they fall into a gray area between regulations for boats and regulations for automobiles. They were never, for example, built nor intended for extended use, but some duck boat tours use craft that were built as long ago as the 1940s. Additionally, some duck boat owners who provided guided tours will modify the duck boats to better accommodate passengers, including lengthening the boats to fit more people on board, and installing canopies and/or plastic/vinyl siding so they can conduct tours in inclement weather. Investigators attributed the 1999 incident to an improperly installed and maintained, which resulted in the craft taking on water. After taking on water and sinking, the death toll was much higher because tourists became trapped under the vehicle's canopy and couldn't escape to the surface. Following 1999 sinking, the NTSB issued a recommendation that all duck boat operators install additional floatation devices to ensure the craft would stay afloat even after the engines and bilge pumps stopped working. Many operators chose not follow that recommendation. While the investigation for the Branson incident last week is still ongoing, it's believed that the high death toll is the result of a similar circumstance, i.e., people couldn't escape the sinking craft due to a canopy that had been installed.

What gets me about articles like this are a couple of things. First, it's jumping to extremes. Whether we're talking about duck boat regulations, gun control, abortion, or anything other issue, people treat it like it's binary. As if the only viable options are either "unfettered access" or "nothing at all." And this article with the "duck boats should be banned" opinion is doing the exact same thing. It is actually possible to find a compromise, but people are just so inclined to reach for the extremes whenever something happens. It'd be nice if a compromise position were proposed every once in a while.

The second thing that bothers me is how rare tragic events lead people to go nuts. Case in point, the journalist who authored this piece had to go back to 1999 to find an event on par with what happened in Missouri. So that's two tragic accidents in... 20 years? Now, I certainly don't want to discount the tragedy of losing any human life, and I'm sure there have been cases of duck boat-related deaths in the years since (albeit maybe not on such a large scale). But we're talking about a moving vehicle. People die on planes, trains, and especially automobiles all the time and yet no one (well at least no one serious) is demanding a ban on air travel or cars.

And third, both of these tragedies were pretty clearly at least in part caused by human factors. It's not like the duck boat itself is inherently a death trap... but when you decrease the structural integrity by lengthening it, load it up with passengers, put a vinyl canopy over the boat that can't be removed in case of emergency... you see where there might be some problems. If I decided to modify my apartment by knocking down some walls to make it more "open concept," would it be the architect or construction foreman's fault if the house suddenly collapsed because I was an idiot and took out a load-bearing beam when I decided to remove the wall? At some point, I think we have to take some responsibility for the fact that the way we choose to act is a big part of the reason why bad things happen.

Which brings me to my argument, I suppose. This will probably out me as the regulation-loving personal-freedom liberal that I am (if that wasn't already obvious ), but it seems to me the best thing to do here is to better regulate the duck boat tour industry. Create laws (rather than optional guidelines) that restrict what operators can and cannot to do their boats so that we're sure there's a basic safety standard. If, after these two incidents, it's pretty clear that canopies exacerbate the problem, lengthening the boats cause structural problems, and the craft were not intended for long-term use, why isn't there a call for legislation that requires owners to (a) not modify their craft unless it's approved by some kind of structural design expert, and (b) replace existing duck boats with new ones at certain intervals, or at least maintain a rigorous safety inspection schedule for the older ones. Hell, you could even work in some sort of subsidy program for those duck boat owners who can't afford to bring their craft up to snuff on their own due to their financial situation. And to those that say, "But duck boats are neither car nor boat so they fall into a gray area!" my answer would be, "Yeah? So write legislation specifically about duck boats!" I don't know at what point things became so dysfunctional that legislatures stopped trying to actually, you know, legislate things.

When you try to ban something entirely, it just makes things worse. Look at what's happening with abortion and gun control. Proposed bans on these things aren't convincing people to just give up trying to get the thing they're determined to get... making it illegal or onerous just makes people more determined to get what they are determined to get in whatever way they can, even if it's against the law. Rather than tell these duck boat tour owners, who make their living with this stuff, that they now have to go out and find another job because they're banned from running their business, I think we need to find a way to implement a structure of rules and laws that will ensure public safety while allowing everyone to continue doing the thing they want to do with a judicious amount of oversight.

And we really need to stop this B.S. where every time something bad happens, we go out looking for people who embody the extreme positions and ask them what they think. So many of us are living between the extremes. How about asking for actual solutions from more centric people who believe there's a way to both protect the public AND allow individuals to exert their personal freedoms to a reasonable extent?