Waterbaby
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http://azdailysun.com/news/local/ma...cle_d5959396-d065-5d07-be09-95273e289074.html
Making wakes: Large tour boats on Powell are putting other lake-goers at risk
It was June of last year when Tucson resident Paul Carey and his family were vacationing in Lake Powell, cruising slowly through the winding curves of Antelope Channel. Carey was sitting on the family’s 23-foot motorboat when his friend told him to hold on because some waves were coming. The group on the boat estimated waves four to seven feet high were peeling off the passing tour boat operated by area concessionaire Aramark.
Before he could react, Carey was thrown up into the air and landed hard back on the boat. The pain was “in a word excruciating,” Carey said. He said his wife remembers his face immediately twisting into a grimace.
Medics determined Carey’s back was fractured and he was airlifted to Flagstaff for immediate back surgery. Months later, he has racked up more than $104,000 in medical bills and is still struggling to get back to his job installing water vending equipment. He is suing Aramark for damages in federal district court.
Carey’s story is one of dozens of serious, and sometimes fatal, accidents that happen on Lake Powell every year that are caused by everything from reckless boating to driving under the influence to bad weather.
But wakes from tour boats top the list when it comes to the most frequent cause of injuries seen by medical staff at Page Hospital, said Sue Gibason a registered nurse in the hospital’s emergency department and intensive care unit. People end up with spinal compression fractures after being thrown up and landing hard on their back or butt as the smaller boats bounce over waves thrown off by the much larger boats, Gibason said.
“They always tell us it was the darn tour boats,” she said.
INJURIES ON THE LAKE
While wakes are the top culprit for putting people in the local hospital, they make up a much smaller proportion of all injuries recorded by officials at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
According to lake dispatchers, for example, wakes like those that tossed Carey accounted for just nine of the 573 total injuries reported at Glen Canyon between 2012 and 2015, said Christiana Admiral, the area’s chief of interpretation. The U.S. Coast Guard, which collects federally mandated reports for more serious accidents, recorded 40 wake-related injuries on the lake since 2005. That’s about half the number of accidents caused by weather and operator inattention and below the 54 injuries caused by operator inexperience.
When it comes to fatalities, not wearing a life jacket, reckless boating and boating under the influence top the list of causes, Admiral said.
But wakes, and especially wakes generated by Aramark’s larger tour boats merit particular attention because the company holds a concession contract on the lake, said Joe Watkins, Carey’s Tucson-based lawyer. Because of that competitive advantage, the company should be held to an elevated standard as to the impact of its operations on other recreationists, Watkins said.
“If you are a kayaker or family boater or a fisherman you shouldn’t expect to be in the position of being knocked out of your boat or capsized just because they run these big boats on the lake,” Watkins said. “The reasonable expectation is that park concessionaires accommodate the public they are there to serve.”
Aramark’s first concession contract on Lake Powell dates back to 1969 and the company offers a variety of tours across the southern part of the lake to places like Antelope Canyon, Rainbow Bridge National Monument and Glen Canyon Dam.
Antelope Point Marina & Resort, another park concessionaire, also offers lake tours, but the boats used are a twin pontoon style, allowing water to pass underneath the boat, which marine experts say creates less wake than Aramark’s boats.
For its part, Aramark could change over its fleet to a lower-wake design, which is what Watkins is pushing for, or the company could reduce the speed of its boats to minimize the wakes they create. That action would be voluntary though because there is no speed limit on Lake Powell -- current federal laws only require a wakeless speed when a boat is within 100 feet of another vessel and in a no-wake zone.
WASHBOARD EFFECT
The risk of wakes has been well communicated within the park and to the company itself, said Mark Suttie, who was the safety officer at Lake Powell until last year and before that worked as Aramark’s director of marine services for 23 years.
“Across the board whether park staff or Aramark staff, the hazards involved with boats striking large wakes is a well known hazard,” Suttie said.
Lake Powell itself is especially dangerous when it comes to wake risk because the waves hit the vertical canyon walls and ricochet back with nearly the same amount of energy, creating a sort of washboard effect, said Agusto “Kiko” Villalon, a marine consultant who has worked closely with the U.S. Coast Guard. Because wake is a function of speed, size and weight, the 50 to 80-foot tour boats are inherently more problematic because they displace more water, he said. An added challenge is blind curves in the lake’s channels and canyons that make it harder to anticipate oncoming boats and notice the wake left behind by a boat farther ahead.
The recreation area itself, which is managed by the National Park Service, took a deeper dive into wake risk several years ago and in 2009 published a report on the topic. While nearly all boats throw off some sort of wake, the NPS research showed that between July 2008 and July 2009 half of the wake-related injuries were caused by the tour boats.
The report’s recommendations included increased education and awareness about wake risk and how visitors should approach wake when they see it, better enforcement of local, state and federal navigational rules and encouraging Aramark to invest in newer vessels with alternative hull designs that produce less wake. The same recommendation for Aramark was made after a 2006 study by Villalon of the death of a motorboat operator after the boat jumped oncoming wake from a tour boat, broke into pieces and sank in deep water
The 2009 report also noted that throughout its study, “Aramark’s director of rates and vice president restricted interaction with all Aramark employees. This was and will continue to be an obstacle to working together to improve visitor safety.”
In response to recent requests for interviews, Aramark Spokesman David Freireich emailed a response that “we regularly consult with both the Coast Guard and National Park Service to ensure we are in compliance with rules and regulations for safely operating tour boats on the Lake and are committed to safely sharing and navigating the waterways with all boaters and recreational watercraft users.”
The park is in the process of developing a new concession contract prospectus and plans to address the issue of boat hull design to minimize wake, Admiral said. There is no timeline on when that process will be finalized though.
Suttie said he repeatedly pressed the company to invest in new boats not only for safety but also for cost savings and fuel efficiency. The company doesn’t have a great track record of replacing boats that are out of date, he said.
“I’m just one person that would have loved to see some modern boats. I’ve made a lot of arguments for them to no avail,” he said.
Suttie said he sees the reasoning behind the company’s resistance though. The new boats are expensive and after Aramark’s lower and upper lake contracts expired in 1998 and 2007 respectively, the company has been operating under one- and two-year extensions, making it hard to make a $3 to $4 million investment without a guaranteed contract, Suttie said. He also said it’s not only tour boats but also large private cruisers that deserve blame for generating large wakes, a point made by the Park Service in its 2009 report as well.
It’s understandable that to give guests a comprehensive tour of the lake tour boats need to speed up beyond a wakeless speed, the problem is they aren’t staying in places where the lake is wide enough to safely accommodate them, Villalon said.
“They like to go into canyons where they can give tourists sense of beauty of Powell,” he said.
Making wakes: Large tour boats on Powell are putting other lake-goers at risk
It was June of last year when Tucson resident Paul Carey and his family were vacationing in Lake Powell, cruising slowly through the winding curves of Antelope Channel. Carey was sitting on the family’s 23-foot motorboat when his friend told him to hold on because some waves were coming. The group on the boat estimated waves four to seven feet high were peeling off the passing tour boat operated by area concessionaire Aramark.
Before he could react, Carey was thrown up into the air and landed hard back on the boat. The pain was “in a word excruciating,” Carey said. He said his wife remembers his face immediately twisting into a grimace.
Medics determined Carey’s back was fractured and he was airlifted to Flagstaff for immediate back surgery. Months later, he has racked up more than $104,000 in medical bills and is still struggling to get back to his job installing water vending equipment. He is suing Aramark for damages in federal district court.
Carey’s story is one of dozens of serious, and sometimes fatal, accidents that happen on Lake Powell every year that are caused by everything from reckless boating to driving under the influence to bad weather.
But wakes from tour boats top the list when it comes to the most frequent cause of injuries seen by medical staff at Page Hospital, said Sue Gibason a registered nurse in the hospital’s emergency department and intensive care unit. People end up with spinal compression fractures after being thrown up and landing hard on their back or butt as the smaller boats bounce over waves thrown off by the much larger boats, Gibason said.
“They always tell us it was the darn tour boats,” she said.
INJURIES ON THE LAKE
While wakes are the top culprit for putting people in the local hospital, they make up a much smaller proportion of all injuries recorded by officials at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
According to lake dispatchers, for example, wakes like those that tossed Carey accounted for just nine of the 573 total injuries reported at Glen Canyon between 2012 and 2015, said Christiana Admiral, the area’s chief of interpretation. The U.S. Coast Guard, which collects federally mandated reports for more serious accidents, recorded 40 wake-related injuries on the lake since 2005. That’s about half the number of accidents caused by weather and operator inattention and below the 54 injuries caused by operator inexperience.
When it comes to fatalities, not wearing a life jacket, reckless boating and boating under the influence top the list of causes, Admiral said.
But wakes, and especially wakes generated by Aramark’s larger tour boats merit particular attention because the company holds a concession contract on the lake, said Joe Watkins, Carey’s Tucson-based lawyer. Because of that competitive advantage, the company should be held to an elevated standard as to the impact of its operations on other recreationists, Watkins said.
“If you are a kayaker or family boater or a fisherman you shouldn’t expect to be in the position of being knocked out of your boat or capsized just because they run these big boats on the lake,” Watkins said. “The reasonable expectation is that park concessionaires accommodate the public they are there to serve.”
Aramark’s first concession contract on Lake Powell dates back to 1969 and the company offers a variety of tours across the southern part of the lake to places like Antelope Canyon, Rainbow Bridge National Monument and Glen Canyon Dam.
Antelope Point Marina & Resort, another park concessionaire, also offers lake tours, but the boats used are a twin pontoon style, allowing water to pass underneath the boat, which marine experts say creates less wake than Aramark’s boats.
For its part, Aramark could change over its fleet to a lower-wake design, which is what Watkins is pushing for, or the company could reduce the speed of its boats to minimize the wakes they create. That action would be voluntary though because there is no speed limit on Lake Powell -- current federal laws only require a wakeless speed when a boat is within 100 feet of another vessel and in a no-wake zone.
WASHBOARD EFFECT
The risk of wakes has been well communicated within the park and to the company itself, said Mark Suttie, who was the safety officer at Lake Powell until last year and before that worked as Aramark’s director of marine services for 23 years.
“Across the board whether park staff or Aramark staff, the hazards involved with boats striking large wakes is a well known hazard,” Suttie said.
Lake Powell itself is especially dangerous when it comes to wake risk because the waves hit the vertical canyon walls and ricochet back with nearly the same amount of energy, creating a sort of washboard effect, said Agusto “Kiko” Villalon, a marine consultant who has worked closely with the U.S. Coast Guard. Because wake is a function of speed, size and weight, the 50 to 80-foot tour boats are inherently more problematic because they displace more water, he said. An added challenge is blind curves in the lake’s channels and canyons that make it harder to anticipate oncoming boats and notice the wake left behind by a boat farther ahead.
The recreation area itself, which is managed by the National Park Service, took a deeper dive into wake risk several years ago and in 2009 published a report on the topic. While nearly all boats throw off some sort of wake, the NPS research showed that between July 2008 and July 2009 half of the wake-related injuries were caused by the tour boats.
The report’s recommendations included increased education and awareness about wake risk and how visitors should approach wake when they see it, better enforcement of local, state and federal navigational rules and encouraging Aramark to invest in newer vessels with alternative hull designs that produce less wake. The same recommendation for Aramark was made after a 2006 study by Villalon of the death of a motorboat operator after the boat jumped oncoming wake from a tour boat, broke into pieces and sank in deep water
The 2009 report also noted that throughout its study, “Aramark’s director of rates and vice president restricted interaction with all Aramark employees. This was and will continue to be an obstacle to working together to improve visitor safety.”
In response to recent requests for interviews, Aramark Spokesman David Freireich emailed a response that “we regularly consult with both the Coast Guard and National Park Service to ensure we are in compliance with rules and regulations for safely operating tour boats on the Lake and are committed to safely sharing and navigating the waterways with all boaters and recreational watercraft users.”
The park is in the process of developing a new concession contract prospectus and plans to address the issue of boat hull design to minimize wake, Admiral said. There is no timeline on when that process will be finalized though.
Suttie said he repeatedly pressed the company to invest in new boats not only for safety but also for cost savings and fuel efficiency. The company doesn’t have a great track record of replacing boats that are out of date, he said.
“I’m just one person that would have loved to see some modern boats. I’ve made a lot of arguments for them to no avail,” he said.
Suttie said he sees the reasoning behind the company’s resistance though. The new boats are expensive and after Aramark’s lower and upper lake contracts expired in 1998 and 2007 respectively, the company has been operating under one- and two-year extensions, making it hard to make a $3 to $4 million investment without a guaranteed contract, Suttie said. He also said it’s not only tour boats but also large private cruisers that deserve blame for generating large wakes, a point made by the Park Service in its 2009 report as well.
It’s understandable that to give guests a comprehensive tour of the lake tour boats need to speed up beyond a wakeless speed, the problem is they aren’t staying in places where the lake is wide enough to safely accommodate them, Villalon said.
“They like to go into canyons where they can give tourists sense of beauty of Powell,” he said.
