Wave, area, company all eerily similar in B.C. whale-watch tragedies
VICTORIA — The waves rose out of nowhere, tipped the boats straight up and hurled people into the churning seas. There was no time for maydays.
The survivor accounts and official reports from two deadly British Columbia whale-watching tragedies 17 years apart bear eerie similarities.
Michael Harris, Pacific Whale Watch Association spokesman, said the location of last October’s tragedy aboard the Leviathan II that claimed six lives and its parallels to a 1998 whale-watching voyage where two people died are bound to raise concerns for investigators.
“Some kind of sea conditions contributed,” he said. “Boats like that don’t just sink. You do have a congruence of location. They are going to look at that.”