There was an engine fire, and the Ride the Ducks boat stalled out. The watercraft drifted, powerless in the Delaware. The Center City skyline loomed behind them, hazy behind the waves of 103-degree heat, and crew members told the tourists to hang tight - a rescue boat was on the way.
One of the passengers called her husband to tell him what was going on, that the Duck boat was dead in the water - and then suddenly the husband heard a scream. The phone went dead.
It was 2:39 p.m.
On the riverbank near Penn's Landing, Meg Scharpf, a tourist from Phoenix, saw what the husband on the phone could not see - a massive 250-foot barge, pushed by a tugboat and seemingly headed right toward the listless watercraft.
At first, Scharpf said, everyone on the boat appeared from the shore to be relaxed, even laughing. The Arizonan thought to herself there was no way the barge could strike the tourist-packed vessel, but that is exactly what happened. Some on the shore were yelling frantically toward the tug: "There's a boat! There's a boat!"
"There was nothing they could do," Scharpf said. "It was the most horrible thing I've ever seen. Everybody seemed to disappear and then they all started popping up with their life vest on."
Except that many had just a few seconds to get those life vests on - and not everybody made it.
"I pushed my [9-year-old] daughter over the side of the boat and tried to get the life jacket on her and I grabbed her by her hair as the boat rolled over on top of us," said one of the passengers, Kevin Grace, 50, of St. Louis. "It was really chaotic. It was flailing bodies everywhere and water and air bubbles."
