A boat filled with tourists taking a pleasure cruise on Lake George in New York state’s Adirondack Mountains capsized suddenly and sank Sunday afternoon under a clear sky, drowning 21 passengers and injuring several more.
The Ethan Allen, a 40-foot glass-enclosed tour boat, went down with 49 people aboard, only a few hundred feet from the lake’s western shore, about 2 miles north of the village of Lake George.
Witnesses and officials said the boat flipped over with startling speed and might have been swamped by the wake of a bigger boat.
Dorothy Warren, a resident who said she brought blankets and chairs to shore for survivors, said one passenger told her “she saw a big boat coming close, and she said, ‘Whoop-dee-doo. I love a rocking boat.”‘ Warren said the woman did not know how she got out of the water but said her mother was killed.
Brian Heart, 48, who was canoeing nearby, said the Ethan Allen made a hard right turn, like it “was trying to steer away from something,” and “in a matter of 45 seconds, it slipped right over.”
Lake George, a long, narrow finger of water ringed by heavily wooded mountains in the southern Adirondacks, is plied daily by several tour boats, most of them much larger than the Ethan Allen.
On sunny weekend days like Sunday, the lake, about an hour’s drive north of Albany, can be a nautical traffic jam of sailboats, small motorboats, larger tour boats and personal watercraft.
Dozens of people passing a sunny afternoon on their own boats or on shore swarmed to the site, pulling survivors from the water, tossing them life preservers and plucking them from the upturned keel of the Ethan Allen before it slipped entirely below the water.
“I could hear people screaming inside the boat,” said Heart, the canoeist. “We just couldn’t get to them.”
The lake is about 70 feet deep where the boat sank.
Witnesses said the passengers had not been wearing life preservers but that few on such cruise boats did. State law requires that life vests be aboard tour boats but not that they be worn at all times.
The website for Shoreline Cruises, owner of the Ethan Allen and other tour boats, says it ordinarily makes short trips and follows a route that hugs the shore. Calls to the company on Sunday were not returned.
The New York State Police superintendent, Wayne Bennett, and Larry Cleveland, the Warren County sheriff, said there had been many reports of another tour boat in the area at the time of the accident but that they could not be sure that its wake had anything to do with the Ethan Allen’s foundering.
Cleveland said the accident occurred about 3 p.m., when temperatures were in the 70s. The Ethan Allen carried nearly its maximum load of 50 people, including the captain.
Afterward, officials of mostly rural Warren County set up a makeshift morgue on a lawn alongside the lake, a row of bodies lined up side by side under white sheets. Soaked survivors – nearly all of them elderly, as were those who died – milled around nearby.
Survivors were taken to Glens Falls Hospital, except for the pilot, who declined treatment, Cleveland said.
“Most patients were cold and wet with some reporting shortness of breath (and) chest pains and a handful receiving treatment for broken ribs,” the hospital said. Seven people were admitted.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Water fatalities
Recent fatal accidents involving passengers on commercial vessels:
March 6, 2004: A water taxi capsizes in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, killing five people.
Oct. 15, 2003: A Staten Island ferry slams into a pier as it is docking, killing 11 people and injuring more than 60.
June 14, 2003: A charter fishing boat capsizes off the Oregon coast, killing 11 people.
May 1, 1999: A World War II-era tourist boat sinks in an Arkansas lake, killing 13 passengers.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS