Seattle college mourns deaths of 4 global students

The North Seattle College community has begun the long process of healing after losing four worldwide students in a crash between a tour bus and duck boat tourist vehicle, the school’s president said Friday.

Student Sandra Miller, who carried white carnations into the memorial, said the accident was “sad, especially for the parents in other countries”.

The students, whose identities have not been released yet, were from Austria, China, Indonesia and Japan, the college said.

The fourth victim, from China, is a minor, and was not identified.

The collision on the Aurora Bridge, which carries one of the city’s main north-south highways over the lake, left a tangled mess of twisted metal, shattered glass and blood, witnesses said. “They shouldn’t be allowed to be used”, Robert Mongeluzzi, a Philadelphia attorney, said Friday, renewing his call for a moratorium on their operation nationwide.

The National Transportation Safety Board says its investigation into a deadly collision involving an amphibious tour vehicle in Seattle is the first time it’s looking into a duck-boat crash on land.

The commission says it wants to inspect each amphibious tour vehicle in the company’s fleet and review the records of every driver. Twelve of the injured were reported to be in critical condition.

During a briefing Friday afternoon, NTSB officials said they would not speculate on the cause of the crash.

Murray said the company had voluntarily taken the duck boats off city streets for the time being. Weener said the team will look at a variety of factors, including the condition of the vehicles, the nature of the injuries and how they were protected, data captured by vehicle recording equipment, the condition of the bridge and the performance of the drivers.

Moody, a 30-year-old pharmacy technician, was sitting right behind the driver, close enough that her dad said he heard the driver just before the crash.

The victims were among 45 worldwide students and staff from the college who were heading to visit a baseball field and an open-air market when their bus crashed with a “Ride the Ducks” vehicle.

Witnesses say something may have gone wrong with the duck boat’s steering or tire.

NTSB Board Member Earl Weener said the left front axle will be sent to a federal lab for further examination.

Seattle Mayor Ed Murray said officials will look at whether there were safety issues on the bridge that contributed to the deadly crash.

“The vehicle involved in (the) crash was not part of the inspection sample in 2012”, Maxwell said in an email to The Seattle Times.

The accident had shaken the diverse school of about 14,000 students, Brown said.

“We didn’t see anything”.

“We were braking as soon as I realized that the wheel locked up and the driver lost control”, Bradly Sawhill, who said he was behind the duck bus, told reporters at the scene.

“I talked to one Vietnamese student who was on a second bus behind the bus in the crash”, Nguyen said in Vietnamese with a friend interpreting. He and his daughter, Ming Chao Wu, are from Taiwan, and he is a visiting scholar at the University of Washington.