A Family’s Idyll Turns to Terror as Vessel Plunges Into Arkansas Lake

On the last morning of her life, Danna Powers opened the curtains of the condominium and gazed out at the glistening waters of Lake Hamilton. To her husband and her daughter she said this: Just pretend it’s the Pacific Coast.

Danna Powers, 32, had fallen in love with the Pacific during the year the family had spent living in Eugene, Ore. But there they were, back living in Arkansas, and on this weekend they were enjoying a holiday in a friend’s lakeside Hot Springs condo. A perfect spring Saturday, made better by a trip in a “duck,” one of the amphibious World War II-era tourist boats that set out from Kahuna Bay to take people around the lake.

The Miss Majestic, however, turned out to be the wrong boat to pick. Within hours, it would be sitting under 51 feet of lake water and Danna Powers and 12 others would be drowned.

And Robert Joseph Powers, 34, and his 8-year-old daughter Madeline would be left to figure out just what happened in a few moments of chaos and water on a lake that had, just hours before, seemed so inviting.

“The last vision I have of my wife,” Powers said, “she was trying to put a life jacket on Madeline.”

It started out unexceptionally. The family sat near the back of the canopy-covered Miss Majestic as it plowed the waters. There were life jackets aboard, but the Powers family wasn’t wearing them. Neither were any of the other 17 passengers.

As the pilot, Elizabeth Helmbrecht, pointed out a large lakeside house, Danna Powers remarked that she wouldn’t mind living on the lake if it could be in a home like that.

Then, about seven minutes out from shore, Helmbrecht stopped the boat and turned in her chair to give the group some more information. But Powers had stopped listening because he’d noticed something odd: The boat was low in the water.

“I didn’t hear another word,” he said.

Suddenly water began flooding the deck. Powers looked at his wife. “I said, ‘That’s not good.’ And then I looked again and I looked at the driver, and she saw what was happening back there.”

Helmbrecht asked passengers to move to the left, apparently thinking overloading on one side of the boat was bringing the water in. Instead, Powers got up and began handing out life jackets. A thought flashed through his mind: If this boat isn’t sinking, I’m going to look pretty silly.

In a moment, he stopped worrying about that.

He tossed life jackets to his wife and daughter and said, “Get out of here. Get out of here now.”

Investigators later said Helmbrecht told them she tried to turn on the bilge pump, grab a radio and turn back toward shore. But there simply wasn’t time.

As Powers distributed life jackets, he was struck by the utter silence. No one screamed. In seconds, the stern dipped below the surface and the craft sank straight down.

“I was inside there going down with it,” Powers said. “It was pitch dark. . . . I was just feeling and trying to get out.”

He doesn’t know how he escaped from the boat; authorities said later that passengers had to get out through a gap between the hull and a canvas canopy that may have hindered their escape. Powers found himself underwater, uncertain which way was up. As he began to scissors-kick, he could see some light.

“I thought I was going toward the light,” he said. “I almost gave up. I thought I was dying.”

On his way up, he swallowed some water. When his head broke the surface, he spit up and looked around. Life jackets were floating all about.

But they were all empty.

His wife was nowhere in sight. He saw his daughter nearby, clinging to a stranger. She wasn’t screaming or even crying.

Diane Ledin, 53, of Oakdale, Calif., later told Powers that Madeline was holding onto her as they came to the surface. “Diane saved my daughter’s life,” Powers said. “She is a hero.”

Several boats were nearby, Powers said, but their operators seemed afraid to approach; perhaps they feared their propellers would hurt someone.

“I started screaming ‘Help us, help us,’ ” he recalled. He grabbed the rope of a ski boat. When he turned around, Madeline and Ledin were gone. A few minutes later, he spotted them on a nearby craft. His daughter was crying for him; the boats pulled together and they were reunited.

But they were still short one person, and Madeline knew it.

“She kept asking me which boat Mommy’s in,” Powers said. But he knew his wife couldn’t swim.

He remembers the sheriff’s boat arriving. He remembers someone asking where the “duck” went down so they could mark the spot. He remembers the two boats taking survivors across the lake to a dock in front of a restaurant that had been converted to a church.

The survivors sat on the front porch and embraced. As they sat, a party barge pulled up, a victim’s body on its deck.

Survivors kept hugging and began talking about who they had lost, what those people had meant to them. His daughter kept clinging to the hope that her mother was alive, and he tried to do the same for her benefit.

“I kept thinking just maybe they would pull up with some people,” he said. “I knew it was false hope.”

“My daughter kept saying, ‘I know she’s safe,’ ” Powers said, but “I knew she was safe with God, not here.”

Sitting in Danna Powers’ parents’ home in Conway, Ark., days later, Powers was surrounded by friends and family. Tim Morse, Danna Powers’ brother, said she and Madeline were alike.

“Sometimes,” he said, “when I hear Madeline I think it’s Danna.”

Powers, a pharmaceutical sales consultant, and his wife, a sales representative for Carlton Cards, met at Conway High School when she was 15 and he was 16. They worked their way through the University of Central Arkansas while rearing their two children. (Their son Zeb, 14, had stayed with his grandparents in Conway for the weekend.)

“We scrimped and saved and got to the point where life was good,” Powers said. “She died very close to being the person she wanted to be.”