Ride the Ducks in Philadelphia has shut down indefinitely, according to a post on the company's official website Wednesday.
The post read "As of October 5, 2016, Ride The Ducks Philadelphia has suspended operations indefinitely."
Calls to the numbers provided in the post went unanswered Wednesday night, but a statement posted to the company's website cited a 330% increase in insurance premiums as the main reason for the shutdown.
"We are working with the 42 full and part-time employees from our Philadelphia location offering severance and outplacement assistance," the statement read in part. [[396103701, C]]
The shut down comes more than four months after Philadelphia attorney Robert J. Mongeluzzi called for a moratorium on duck boat tour operations nationwide following deadly incidents.
Late Wednesday, Mongeluzzi issued a statement saying in part, "Philadelphia tourists and pedestrians are safer now that Ride the Ducks Philadelphia has unexpectedly announced an immediate and indefinite suspension of service."
In April, a 29-year-old woman was killed and her passenger was injured after the scooter she was driving was struck by an amphibious sightseeing vehicle in downtown Boston.
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A duck boat crashed into a charter bus, killing five passengers on the bus last year in Seattle. Two Hungarian tourists were killed in 2010 when a sightseeing duck boat was hit by a barge on the Delaware River near Philadelphia.
Also in Philadelphia, a Ride the Ducks vehicle struck and killed a woman in 2015 who witnesses say was crossing the street, distracted by her cellphone.
“How many more people have to die in duck boat accidents before authorities realize they are deadly on land and in the water,” Mongeluzzi wrote in a released statement, back in April. “Through our experience representing victims of duck boat disasters we’ve determined they are fatally flawed; they’re death traps on the water due to their hazardous canopy design and on land they are engineered to restrict the peripheral vision of the operator, creating significant blind spots.”
Duck boats were first used by the U.S. Army when it deployed thousands of amphibious landing craft during World War II that were known then by their military designation, DUKW. Once the war was over, they were used by civilian law enforcement agencies and also converted to sightseeing vehicles in U.S. cities. The DUKW designation was replaced with the duck boat moniker that is used by various tour companies.
