SEATTLE (Reuters) - One of the drivers of an amphibious “duck boat” that collided with a bus in Seattle in 2015, killing five international students, told mechanics days earlier there was something wrong with the craft, a plaintiff’s attorney said on Wednesday.
The revelation is in court documents filed as part of a lawsuit over the Sept. 24, 2015, collision that cite a previously sealed deposition by Sarah Chido, who was not the driver in the crash.
According to her deposition, Chido reported on Sept. 20, 2015, that Duck Boat 6 was making such strange noises that “it made the hair on my back stand up.”
She pulled over and called mechanics, but they spent only two minutes inspecting the craft before sending her on her way, she said.
Four days later, Boat 6 crashed into a charter bus carrying students on the city’s busy Aurora Bridge, killing five and injuring dozens, after a front axle failed.
“This company in my opinion chose to sacrifice safety and proper maintenance by not providing the resources to get it done,” plaintiffs attorney Karen Koehler said in a phone interview.
Ride the Ducks International agreed in December 2016 to pay a $1 million fine after the National Transportation Safety Board found it had failed to issue a recall for potentially defective axles on the vehicles.
Chido’s complaint was too general to lead mechanics to the axle problem, Mark Firmani, a representative for Ride the Ducks’ Seattle franchise, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. He added that the issue would not have been visible during a normal inspection.
The collision increased scrutiny of the boat-buses, which have been involved in several deadly accidents. Four months before the Seattle crash, a similar vehicle in Philadelphia fatally struck a woman, and in April 2016, a Boston Duck Tours bus struck and killed a woman.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys claim that Ride the Ducks’ Seattle franchise had an understaffed maintenance crew and refused to hire more mechanics because of cost.
In another deposition, Ryan Johnson, the company’s Seattle operations manager, confirmed he had warned management that some drivers were not comfortable reporting vehicle problems for fear of being ridiculed by maintenance.
Johnson said the company’s Seattle head of maintenance, Joe Hatten, sometimes raised his voice and swore at employees.
Hatten said he logged complaints more than a year before the crash about having too few employees to properly maintain the fleet, court documents showed.
Reporting by Tom James and Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Patrick Enright and Richard Chang
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.