"Let them all have had their life jackets on."
Life jackets are exactly what the National Transportation Safety Board had in mind nine years ago when the agency issued its final report on the sinking of the Miss Majestic. Among its recommendations to the Coast Guard, the NTSB report urged that passengers be required to wear life jackets any time Duck boats enter water and that tour companies eliminate the canopies that shield passengers from the sun and rain.
But groups with vested interests in fun, breezy tours considered those two recommendations troublesome, and the Coast Guard never implemented them.
Two Hungarian tourists, Dora Schwendtner, 16, and Szabolcs Prem, 20, died in an accident on the Delaware July 7, when a tugboat pushed a sludge barge into Duck 34, an amphibious boat operated by the Ride the Ducks tour company. Thirty-three traumatized passengers and two crew members survived.
One marine-safety advocate believes the Coast Guard is partly responsible for the crash.
"They refused to abide by the NTSB and this is what happened. Two people died," said Ronald G. Sinn, a licensed master, or boat captain, from Cape May. "Obviously, they wouldn't have been killed if they had been wearing life jackets and if the boat hadn't had a canopy."
The loss of life was even greater in the Miss Majestic accident, in which 13 people drowned, including three children. One mother was found clutching her 3-year-old son at the bottom of Lake Hamilton still sitting in their seat.
The circumstances surrounding the Delaware River accident were different from the Lake Hamilton calamity, Maron said, but "loss is loss."
Maron's loss was Job-like. She's remarried now, but she was known as Laura Todd back then, when the sinking claimed the lives of her second husband, Richard Todd, 40; daughter Emily, 4; son Thomas, 5; and daughter-in-law Melanie McGuirk, 22.
