Nine members of one family died in that Duck Boat accident. Seventeen people died.

[malaise]

Spare a thought for the survivors

[defacto7]

1. How horrible....

[Kittycow]

2. I'm so saddened to learn that....

It's going to devastate so many circles of people.

[Mendocino]

3. The SS Eastland

In 1915 an overloaded excursion vessel the SS Eastland flipped over in Chicago. 844 passengers and crew were trapped and drowned. The ship was known to be subject to listing and being top heavy, a term sometime referred as turn-turtle.

Sounds like the DUKW boat on a smaller scale.

[yortsed snacilbuper]

4. I was in the C.G. stationed at NOLA when the White Alder was sunk in the Mississippi, it was sad.

Tender history

White Alder was stationed at New Orleans, Louisiana throughout her Coast Guard career, which spanned 1947 until 1968. Her primary assignment was to tend river aids-to-navigation although she was called upon to conduct other traditional Coast Guard duties, such as search and rescue or law enforcement duties, as required. In mid-November 1965 she escorted raised barge carrying chlorine to a chemical plant and on 4 December 1968 she refloated cutter USCGC Loganberry (WLI-65305), which had been beached on 3 December.

At approximately 18:29 CST on 7 December 1968, the "downbound" White Alder collided with the "upbound" M/V Helena, a 455-foot (139 m) Taiwanese freighter in the Mississippi River at mile 195.3 above Head of Passes near White Castle, Louisiana and sank in 75 feet (23 m) of water. Three of the crew of 20 were rescued, while the other 17 perished. Divers recovered the bodies of three of the dead but river sediment buried the cutter so quickly that continued recovery and salvage operations proved impractical. The Coast Guard decided to leave the remaining 14 crewmen entombed in the sunken cutter, which remains buried in the bottom of the Mississippi River.

The Coast Guard dedicated a memorial, at the Coast Guard base in New Orleans, to the White Alder and her crew on 7 December 1969. The memorial was moved to the new Coast Guard Group New Orleans offices in Metairie, Louisiana, and rededicated on 6 December 2002.


I was friends with the crew, we would go on liberty together.

Al

[malaise]

5. Too sad

I remember when the ferry between St Kitts and Nevis, the Christena, sank in the 1970. There were about ninety survivors but over 200 people drowned.
http://www.thestkittsnevisobserver.com/archives/nevisians-survivors-remember-christena-disaster/amp/

[Raine]

6. Thoughts