Right before the Ride the Ducks boat capsized due to a severe thunderstorm and 60 miles per hour winds with 31 people aboard, passengers and crew did whatever they could to save the lives of the children that were on board the doomed ship. "When that boat is found, all those life jackets are going to be on there because nobody pulled one off".
Duck boat survivor Tia Coleman is telling her story about the tragic accident that killed nine of her family members and 17 passengers out of the 29 on board.
The state is looking into the incident to see whether any criminal acts were committed, Hawley said, while the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating to determine the cause of the sinking.
Others killed included 65-year-old William Bright and his wife, Janice, 63, of Higginsville, Mo. He noted they were originally created to assault beaches in World War II.
During the closing benediction, Nixa Fire Chaplain Steve Martin said of the victims that while "most of them are visitors ... they are not strangers to us". They had been on a family vacation from Indiana.
Duck boats, based on World War II military landing craft known as DUKWs, are popular with tourists because they permit sightseeing on both land and water.
People look at a memorial in front of Ride the Ducks Saturday, July 21, 2018 in Branson, Mo.
"Even with amusement rides, which this essentially is, there are restrictions on height and weight, the operations in winds, etcetera", Hall said.
"If you have the information that you could have rough waters or a storm coming, why ever put a boat on that water?"
He said that while the aviation industry has made strides in building a strong safety code, "we do not have that in the marine industry".
The U.S. Coast Guard said the boat that sank was built in 1944 and had passed an inspection in February. It sank 40 feet and then rolled to an area 80 feet deep, according to local investigators. Seventeen of the 31 passengers died.
Surprise weakness of inflation data stirs debate over interest-rate rise
Ben Brettell, senior economist, Hargreaves Lansdown, said: "There's certainly a case for higher rates as soon as next month". Despite clothing sales and cheaper computer games, consumers also battled with falling wage growth .
Three of Coleman's children and her husband were among the dead. She and her 13-year-old nephew, Donovan Hall, were the only members of her family to survive.
While speaking at Cox Medical Center Branson on Saturday, Tia, of Indianapolis, emotionally described the feeling of fighting to save her own life and her kids.
"The captain did say something about life jackets". There are three sizes.
Coleman added: "You weren't supposed to grab them unless you were in distress, which we were, but he told us ... we don't need them".
"We have fairly sophisticated means to dry them out, retrieve the data that's on there", said the NTSB spokesman.
"I said, 'Lord, please, I've gotta get to my babies. Also, they're here, and it's our job to try to make them feel welcome", she said.
The vessel will be loaded onto a vehicle and transported to a facility where the National Transportation Safety Board will take custody of it.
Citing the ongoing investigation, the company declined to comment and referred all inquiries to the NTSB.
A witness's video of the Branson duck boat just before it capsized suggests that its flexible plastic windows might have been closed and could have trapped passengers as the hybrid boat-truck went down.
A suicide bomber carried out an attack near the Kabul airport Sunday, killing 14 people and narrowly missing Afghanistan's vice president, who was returning home after living in Turkey for over a year, security officials said.