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posted by
martyb
on Thursday July 26 2018, @08:01AM
from the if-it-walks-like-a-duck,-sinks-like-a-duck,-oh,-wait... dept.
from the if-it-walks-like-a-duck,-sinks-like-a-duck,-oh,-wait... dept.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
The duck boat that sank in a Missouri lake last week, killing 17 people, was built based on a design by a self-taught entrepreneur who had no engineering training, according to court records reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.
The designer, entrepreneur Robert McDowell, completed only two years of college and had no background, training or certification in mechanics when he came up with the design for "stretch" duck boats more than two decades ago, according to a lawsuit filed over a roadway disaster in Seattle involving a similar duck boat in 2015.
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Duck Boat in Missouri Disaster was Designed by Entrepreneur With no Engineering Training
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Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
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(Score: 5, Informative) by deadstick on Thursday July 26 2018, @12:05PM (2 children)
Originally, they were WW2 DUKW's, hence the name. It's basically a 6x6 Army truck with a boat hull around it, so it can be driven down a beach and into the water. The duck tours operated for years with war-surplus DUKW's, but those eventually wore out and new ones were built to a cheapened design that has not been through a military-grade procurement process.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 26 2018, @02:44PM (1 child)
Military standards are kind of hit or miss. On the one hand they tend to be great against things like small arms fire compared with civilian models, on the other hand though since the federal government is immune to lawsuits from military casualties in most cases, they tend to tolerate a higher risk of death than you would tolerate in something that's designed for civilian use.
There's a right and a wrong way to adapt military gear for civilian use and this isn't the right way. Doing it like Hummer did was more or less right. You engineer something from scratch that has similar handling capabilities as the original and make sure to test that it's actually safe. But, sometimes, the design is just not safe for civilian use. And this is probably one of those times. Between them being so high off the ground and them being a design that's not particularly stable, it's more or less inevitable that problems will occur.
When I road on one of these decades ago, it was one of those original surplus vehicles and I don't recall having ridden through crowded areas on it.
(Score: 2) by deadstick on Friday July 27 2018, @01:32AM
We rode the ones at Wisconsin Dells years ago, when they had the original surplus equipment. The business was in a commercial district, and we drove through normal traffic to the water -- not exactly "crowded areas", but mixing with ordinary vehicle traffic.