Duck Boat Safety Enhancement Act of 2019
Floor Speech
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Mr. HAWLEY. Mr. President, July 19, 2018, is a date that we in Missouri won't ever forget. There were 17 people who lost their lives and 11 who were injured in a boating accident on Table Rock Lake. During a severe thunderstorm, a duck boat called Stretch Duck 7 sank with 31 people aboard, including children. Today marks 875 days since that tragedy.
To the families and friends who lost loved ones that day, I am sure that every one of those 875 days since has come with a new and painful reminder of your loss.
I am here today to honor those who lost their lives, the 17 victims of that tragedy--a tragedy that should never have happened--and also to honor the survivors who live with the memory of that tragedy every day. They deserve to be remembered. They deserve to be respected by this body, and I am here to do something about it. The time has come to act.
I am here to ask this body to do its job and finally pass my bill that will impose tough, new security restrictions and measures on every duck boat operation in America. This is a bill I introduced almost 2 years ago that passed the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation unanimously.
Now, truth be told, it has taken this body far too long to act. The tragedy in Missouri may have been one of the more recent duck boat tragedies, but it is far from the first. In 1999, 13 people were killed when a duck boat sank during a tour of Lake Hamilton in Arkansas. In the years since, the death toll has climbed to over 40. In 2001, there was a duck boat accident in Seattle, WA. In 2010, a tugboat on the Delaware River in Philadelphia collided with a duck boat. In 2013, a duck boat caught fire in the San Francisco Bay. I could go on.
Now, the National Transportation Safety Board has issued numerous recommendations to improve duck boat safety, and it has issued many of these recommendations multiple times. The U.S. Coast Guard, which regulates these crafts, has recently concurred with quite a number of these recommendations. Yet, to be frank, we need more than recommendations. We need more than studies and surveys. We need laws. It has been 875 days, and we have seen investigation after investigation conclude the same thing: that lives could have been saved if action had been taken--if this body had acted, if the security measures had been put in place.
The time for delay has passed, and the time to act is now in order to save future lives and to make sure that the tragedy that happened in Branson is not repeated again in Missouri or in any other State.
My legislation would take those recommendations and put them into law. It includes provisions to ensure that duck boats remain buoyant during flooding. It requires dangerous canopies to be removed. It requires life jackets for passengers. My legislation would also ensure that duck boats would not go out during severe weather and also require the operators of duck boats to know what the weather is--a commonsense provision but one not currently required under the law.
I thank Senator Blunt, Senator Cotton, and Senator Duckworth for supporting this legislation and for their strong support for lifesaving provisions. I thank Chairman Wicker for moving this bill through the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, where, once again, it received unanimous support. Now it is time to make it the law of the land.
1031 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.
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Mr. HAWLEY.
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