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 Thursday's crash between the Ride the Ducks truck and the bus on
Seattle's Aurora Bridge also sent about 50 people to hospitals.
The collision increased scrutiny on the duck boats, which carry
tourists on tours and have been involved in a number of deadly
crashes in recent years.
Washington state's Utilities and Transportation Commission suspended
all Ride the Ducks operations in the state, said spokeswoman Amanda
Maxwell. The company had already suspended its tours.
Atlanta-based Ride the Ducks International, which refurbishes the
World War Two-era trucks, told its customers the housing around the
axle was a potential failure point and recommended repairs and
increased monitoring, National Transportation Safety Board member
Earl Weener said on Sunday.
Weener also said the left front axle of the amphibious vehicle was
sheared off, but it was unclear how that occurred. Early indications
suggest the axle was sheared off before the collision, another NTSB
official said.
A possible fix would have been to weld collars around the shaft,
Weener said, adding the vehicle in Thursday's crash did not receive
recommended repairs and that it was unclear whether the Seattle
franchise received the warning from Ride the Ducks International in
2013.
Ride the Ducks International said in a statement on Monday it
recommended front axle housing repair for 57 Duck vehicles in 2013
and "had no reason to believe that Seattle had not complied with the
bulletin."
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Ride the Ducks of Seattle, an independently owned licensee that
bought the refurbished vehicle in 2005, said: "We are working to
understand what happened, and have completely opened our operations
to NTSB investigators."
The U.S. Army-surplus vehicle that crashed was built in 1945 and
refurbished in 2005, Weener said, adding there were about 100
similar trucks in service nationwide.
Students killed in the crash were from Austria, Indonesia, Japan and
China, North Seattle College said in a statement. A 20-year-old
student, the fifth victim, died on Sunday, a hospital said.
The accident came nearly five months after an amphibious sightseeing
vehicle fatally struck a woman on a Philadelphia street. In 2010,
two tourists were killed when a tugboat pushed a barge into a
similar vehicle, also in Philadelphia.
(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle; Editing by Daniel Wallis
and Peter Cooney)
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