One person died and more than a dozen others had to be rescued after a tour boat capsized Monday morning while carrying passengers through an underground cavern in western New York, prompting an all-out rescue effort, officials said.
Twenty-nine people were on board when the boat tipped over at the Lockport Cave in Lockport, N.Y., Luca Quagliano, Lockport’s fire chief, said at a news conference. Emergency workers rescued 16 people from the water, Chief Quagliano said; the rest were able to get to safety on their own.
In addition to the person who died, eleven people were hospitalized with minor injuries after being pulled from the water, Chief Quagliano said.
The police in Lockport, about 20 miles east of Niagara Falls, said that a report of a boat capsizing had come in at about 11:30 a.m. The city’s police and fire departments and other public safety agencies immediately began rescue efforts, officials said.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, in a message posted on Twitter, said that members of her staff were in close contact with local officials and emergency operations teams at the scene.
Near the Lockport Cave offices on Monday afternoon, firefighters, police and New York State Police formed a human wall around people who appeared to have been rescued from the boat, many of them wrapped in white towels. As ambulances idled nearby, some people from a tour group got back onto a bus, which eventually drove off.
Ashley Kandel of Victor, N.Y., was among the onlookers. She said that she and her husband, Tarek, had been scheduled to take the cave tour at 2 p.m. She said she had sensed that something might be wrong when they were on their way to the cave in the late morning.
The couple encountered a large number of fire trucks and noticed that streets in the area were blocked off, Ms. Kandel said. She called Lockport Caves to ask about the unusual traffic, but no one answered, she said.
“We were going to face our fear of being underground,” Ms. Kandel said, describing part of the couple’s motivation for taking the tour.
Dan Higgins contributed reporting.