Around three dozen people were injured after a mega yacht struck a Hudson River dock in upper Manhattan on Saturday afternoon, the FDNY said.
First responders rushed to the scene around 4:18 p.m. near the Henry Hudson Parkway and W. 130th St. off of West Harlem after a large cocktail cruise ship with several hundred people on board hit a dock at the West Harlem Piers.
“A boat was attempting to dock when it allegedly…struck a piling,” said FDNY Deputy Chief Gregg Brady. “At that point, [fire and police] marine units assisted the vessel to the dock, where it’s tied up, and we began to offload 352 people to be assessed that were actually on the vessel at the time.”
A total of 35 people were injured, with 22 of them being transferred to local area hospitals, Brady said.
People who were on the boat told the Daily News that the captain was having issues getting the vessel back into the dock after a cruise down the river, and tried numerous times to dock the boat before the hard crash.
“He couldn’t get it close enough, and then he went…back out in the water,” said Franz Robinson, 61 who witnessed the crash from a nearby park. “Then he came back again, and then the boat turned sideways, and then it just drifted into this boat right here. It banged into this dock right here, and the whole side outside of that boat is just messed up.”
“The whole thing just shook,” Robinson added. “You heard it, it was a loud bang.”
Once everyone had been escorted off of the cruise ship after the accident, it took off, according to Brady. The vessel suffered damage to its stern.
“The captain was, you know, backing [into] the dock,” said Lynne Johnson, 67, who was a passenger on the boat. “All of a sudden, he came back in and he backed in again, and then, like, on one of his attempts, he obviously hit something because we went [flying] from one end of the ship to the other. Yeah, so it was a little crazy.”
The boat, dubbed the Timeless, is a luxurious party cruise ship billed as a mega yacht that can hold up to 550 people.
The outing had been a fun time for everyone — until the shocking finale.
“It was wonderful, it was a lot of birthday celebrations,” Carol Jones, 61, another passenger who was on the boat, said. “It was nice until we went to park. We heard the bang.”
Brady said the smash landing was uncommon, and cited the importance of local first responders in keeping the river free of hazards.
“No, not too often,” the deputy chief said of the jarring incident. “Waterways are very safe and the captains and our Coast Guard and our police and marine divisions and our fire divisions make sure that…our waterways are very safe.”
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