Steamboat fans pressure Congress to save Delta Queen

The Save the Delta Queen Campaign is targeting the leaders of Congress this week in a last-ditch effort to keep the nation's most famous paddlewheeler afloat.

The grass-roots organization is bombarding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip James Clyburn with phone calls, emails and faxes in the hopes of gaining their support for legislation that would continue the historic vessel's long-standing exemption from fire safety rules. The exemption expires in November, and without it, the boat will have to stop sailing.

On Friday, the group delivered petitions in favor of the exemption to Congress signed by more than 5,000 supporters.

Congress has granted the Delta Queen an exemption from the 42-year-old safety rules nine times in the past, nearly always by close-to-unanimous margins. But the chairman of the House Committee on Transportation, Rep. James Oberstar, D-Minn., has been blocking a further exemption, calling the boat a fire hazard.

Congressman Steve Chabot, R-Ohio, has introduced a bill, co-sponsored by more than two dozen representatives of both parties, that would extend the Delta Queen's exemption from the safety rules until 2018. But the legislation remains stuck in Oberstar's committee.

Several media outlets have reported that Oberstar has opposed the exemption to appease a labor union that has been a donor to his campaigns. The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review quoted a Congressional aide as saying "it was and remains a union dispute," noting that the boat's new owners did not accept the collective bargaining contract of the Seafarers International Union when it bought the Delta Queen.

The Save the Delta Queen Campaign, meanwhile, argues that the 1966 fire safety law that is in question was intended to cover ocean-going ships, not riverboats that operate within yards of the shore.