A woman driving a motor scooter died Saturday after being struck by a “duck boat” amphibious tour vehicle loaded with passengers on a downtown Boston street, police said.
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Boston police report that accident took place at approximately 11:30 am and that the woman was rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital where she was pronounced dead. A male passenger riding on the scooter with the woman was injured, but did not sustain any life-threatening injuries.
NECN legal editor Randy Chapman says he doesn’t believe one fatal crash in the Boston fleet will outweigh the Duck Boat Tours long record of safety here, but he could see it prompting some changes. There were no other injuries.
Boston Duck Tours tells The Associated Press it reviewed the driver’s driving record in March and there are “discrepancies” between information it received and information that was reported.
The road was closed as authorities investigated the cause of the incident.
The duck boat hit an unidentified person just before noon in the area of Beacon and Charles Streets.
Four people were killed last September when a duck boat belonging to Ride the Ducks of Seattle collided with a charter bus carrying college students. The spokesman didn’t comment further when asked about details of the employee’s driving record.
The woman killed has been identified by her family as 28-year-old Allison Warmuth, an insurance underwriter who lived in the city.
Tow trucks are at the scene, along with the duck boat involved in the mishap.
“Through our experience representing victims of duck boat disasters we’ve determined they are fatally flawed; they’re death traps on the water due to their hazardous canopy design and on land they are engineered to restrict the peripheral vision of the operator, creating significant blind spots”, he added.
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Mongeluzzi says he feels even those changes would not be enough to ensure safe operation of Duck Boats.
