You Had Better Duck

Some time ago in this space I wrote about the adventures of a 60-foot yellow rubber duck that had exploded in a harbor in Taiwan, which I used as an example of unexpected operational failures and the need to stay at least one move ahead of whatever else is going on. At the times this may have seemed a bit harsh, given that rubber ducks do not usually explode, and that if you are in the middle of displaying an 18-meter tall inflatable sculpture half a world away from your home base (the duck’s creator is from The Netherlands) there are probably a great many things on your checklist that come before “Make Sure Duck Does Not Explode.” For example, making sure that the duck does not get loose from its moorings and float away down a river, never to be seen again…

You can pick up the story from the BBC News site if this is getting too fantastical for you, and I certainly wouldn’t blame you if you did. Apparently, after exploding (or bursting, at least) in Taiwan and deflating in Hong Kong, the duck had been taken to a port on the Nanming River where it was mounted on a 10-ton metal platform and anchored to the riverbed using steel cables – none of which appears to have slowed it down when flood waters hit the installation and sent the duck drifting away. Despite the fact that the duck weighs over a ton, is as tall as a five-storey building, and is bright yellow (like the bath toy it resembles) there have been no reported sightings of it confirmed at this time…

Now, I will be the first to admit that I don’t know anything about public art installations, meteorology, river currents, large-scale rubber fabrication or the relative tensile strength of steel anchor cables. But I do know a few things about preventable failure, and I must admit that if a project I was running had already exploded, deflated, been attacked by eagles (as reported here), and was a larger-scale version of an installation that had already gotten loose from its moorings once in Europe (although that time the duck was caught again – when it became wedged against a large bridge, effectively blocking travel on both the roadway on the bridge and the canal below) I might consider asking how certain everyone was that this particular installation was safe…

Fortunately for all parties involved the duck isn’t really part of a business venture; its International tour (which has already passed through Sydney, Sao Paulo and Baku without incident) is intended mainly to bridge cultural barriers and increase understanding between nations by exposing them to something so completely absurd and yet aesthetically adorable that anyone whose sense of wonder hasn’t been surgically removed must stand in amazement and/or swear off of whatever they were drinking the night before. But advertising stunts using smaller inflatable constructs are becoming increasingly common in some countries (including the US), and the duck’s misadventures give an excellent example of just how far an otherwise harmless publicity stunt could potentially go off the rails – or, in this case, down the river…

It has often been noted that while all human beings learn from mistakes, the truly successful person is usually the one who learns from someone else’s mistakes. I certainly hope this is true – especially if any of my readers (assuming I have readers) is planning anything that involves large-scale public installations, river conditions, or inflatable waterfowl…