When will they ever learn…

To be sure, accidents sometimes happen. However, often what is reported as an “accident” is not an accident at all, but an event caused by ignorance or stupidity or both. Three close encounters of the deadly kind happened a week ago on our South Saskatchewan River in downtown Saskatoon. Nobody died, but wow, they were close, and two or three people wound up in hospital on an otherwise gorgeous Sunday evening.

The first preventable close-call occurred when the operator of a personal watercraft (PWC) decided to play chicken with a 20-ton passenger boat going downstream in a fast current. The PWC darted in from off the boat’s port side between it and a concrete bridge pier, missing the pier by scant feet and ship’s bow by scant inches. Duh. (Didn’t even look up.)

On the same afternoon, a couple of folks decided to drift down the in-flood river on inner-tubes. All well and good, maybe, but they seemed to forget that they needed to get to shore before they went over a 12-foot dam - until it was almost too late! One did get to shore, and thence to hospital, and the rescue service was sent out to find the other person.

And, while the rescue boat was out looking for the missing tuber, yet another PWC operator arrived alongside to report a PWC collision half a mile upriver. At last report, the damage from that little exercise was two people sent to hospital and two badly wrecked motorized water toys.

The “duh” factor in this last little piece of excitement doesn’t just belong to the PWC jockeys. The really dumb thing is that this last event – injuries, property damage and all – went apparently unreported, with no police investigation and no charges laid. How can this happen? You can bet that if two guys had crashed their motorcycles in a parking lot, things would be different. Why is dangerous behaviour on a public waterway somehow less important?

Happily, nobody died on the river in Saskatoon that Sunday afternoon. We were much luckier than the folks on Shuswap Lake in British Columbia a few days later. Thirteen people were cruising along in their houseboat when a high-powered runabout came over the bow and through the cabin, killing one person and severely injuring several others. As reported in the media, the usual litany of excuses was being blamed: alcohol, inexperience, darkness, crowded waterway, and so on.

But what it’s really all about is lack of education and enforcement (impaired driving, operating illegally, failure to follow the rules of the road) along with a highly ineffective and annoying operator licensing system. Good grief – it’s more complicated to fill out a magazine subscription than it is to pass the Private Vessel Operator’s Certificate online, and it costs about as much.

I have had a lifetime love-affair with boats and small ships of all sorts, and fully understand why people want to be out on the water. And I welcome pretty well everyone and everything that floats onto the water. But unless governments of all levels agree to shed their inter-jurisdictional disagreements, and commit some serious funding to enforcement, people are going to start dying in ever-greater numbers. And it’s not just the people at the bottom of the gene pool who drown – a lot of innocent people wind up dead too!

Peter Kingsmill