Duck boat tours should be banned, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board said after a duck boat capsized in Branson, Missouri, killing 17 people last week, according to USA Today.
Jim Hall, who led the NTSB under President Bill Clinton, said the incident last Thursday on Table Rock Lake in bad weather was similar to a 1999 incident involving an Arkansas duck boat that killed 13 people, the newspaper said.
On Monday, the U.S. Coast Guard will try to raise the sunken amphibious vessel, which had 31 people on it when it went down, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It sank in about 80 feet of water near the Branson Belle Showboat.
The former federal official charged that the duck boat tours are for all practical purposes unregulated amusement park rides, according to USA Today. Duck boats are based on the World War II military landing crafts that permit sightseeing on both land and water.
But the boats were never designed for extended use and have to be modified to carry extra passengers for tours, USA Today noted.
"My feeling after seeing this one is that the only thing to do in the name of public safety is to ban them," Hall told USA Today. "I think it's the responsible thing to do to ensure (riders) are not put at risk."
USA Today reported that in the 1999 incident, the NTSB charged that the Coast Guard failed to adequately oversee the private operation and the owner failed to properly maintain a seal that allowed water to get into the vehicle.
"Contributing to the sinking was a flaw in the design of DUKWs as converted for passenger service, that is, the lack of adequate reserve buoyancy that would have allowed the vehicle to remain afloat in a flooded condition," the NTSB said then, according to USA Today.
"Contributing to the high loss of life was a continuous canopy roof that entrapped passengers within the sinking vehicle," the report continued.
Nine members of one family were among the 17 who lost their lives, CNN reported Monday. Tia Coleman lost her husband, three children, and five other family members in the accident, where investigators are asking why life jackets were on board but not required, the broadcaster said.
"I felt like, if I was able to get a life jacket I could have saved my babies because they could have at least floated up to the top and somebody could have grabbed them," Coleman told reporters, according to CNN.
USA Today wrote about 300 people attended a Sunday afternoon service at Williams Memorial Chapel at College of the Ozarks, where a bell chimed 17 times for the victims.
The newspaper said that divers recovered a video recorder from the sunken duck boat that may provide clues to the accident. NTSB will analyze the recorder, but they are not sure if the recorder was working at the time of the capsizing, USA Today wrote.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.