By Leah Thorsen and Kim Bell

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Safety concerns about duck boats similar to the Ride the Ducks tourist vessel that sank Thursday on Table Rock Lake, Mo., killing 17 people, have been sounded for years.

A scathing report by the National Transportation Safety Board after a deadly wreck involving a duck boat in Arkansas in 1999 recommended requiring the vessels to improve buoyancy so they would remain afloat and upright when flooded, even when carrying passengers and crew. But such a rule was never enacted.

The Miss Majestic duck boat sank to the bottom of Lake Hamilton near Hot Springs, Ark., on May 1, 1999, killing 13 people, including three children.

One passenger escaped before the boat submerged, and the others were trapped by its canopy roof and drawn under water, the NTSB report said.

As the duck sank to the bottom of the lake, six passengers and the operator escaped and were rescued.

The NTSB determined that the probable cause of the flooding and sinking of the Miss Majestic was that its owner, Land and Lakes Tours Inc., did not adequately repair and maintain the vessel.

Other factors contributed, including a flaw in the design of the boat as converted for passenger service, specifically the “lack of adequate reserve buoyancy that would have allowed the vehicle to remain afloat in a flooded condition,” the report said.

The vessel’s unsafe condition was worsened by the lack of adequate oversight by the Coast Guard, the report said. One reason so many lives were lost, it continued, was a “continuous canopy roof that entrapped passengers within the sinking vehicle.”

Specific details about the boat — identified by the Coast Guard as Stretch Duck 7 — that capsized Thursday amid whitecaps on Table Rock Lake were not immediately available, although storms pummeled the area where it went under.

The Ride the Ducks tourist vessels have been a Branson fixture for about 40 years, and got new owners in December when the company was sold to Ripley Entertainment.

The boat was developed by General Motors in 1942 for the Allied troops, according to the Encyclopedia of Weapons of World War II, and 147 were built during the war.

The vehicles transported troops, equipment and supplies by land and sea.

They were first used in tourism in the 1940s, according to the Davis Law Group in Seattle, which compiled a list of duck-boat crashes around the world. That list said 43 people have been killed since 1999, including the 17 on Table Rock Lake, when they sank or had been in crashes on streets since 1999.

In Seattle in 2015, a duck boat’s axle broke and the driver lost control on Highway 99. The boat crossed the center line and crashed into a bus. Five passengers on the bus were killed and 69 people were hurt.

And about five years earlier in Philadelphia, a tugboat pulling a barge crashed into a duck boat on the Delaware River. Two students were killed.

Andrew Duffy, a lawyer from Philadelphia, represented the victims from that crash. The suit yielded a $15 million settlement for the families of the two students who died, plus $2 million to be shared among survivors.

On Friday, Duffy said he had been calling for a ban on duck boats ever since. He said he was amazed that, after the NTSB issued its report in the Arkansas crash, no one heeded warnings about the vessels’ safety issues.

“We should be asking for a complete ban of these death traps,” Duffy said. “Enough is enough. They are portrayed as happy-go-lucky vessels, and they’re not.”

Duffy said the fixed canopies over the passenger compartment were an inherent design flaw that made them so dangerous.

“When you are cruising along in a normal boat, if it capsizes you go into the water,” Duffy said. “With duck boats, you have the opposite effect. The canopy literally acts to drag you down with it.”

Duffy said a life jacket could make it harder to escape.

“Assuming that a good captain in a high-wind, thunderstorm situation tells everyone on a duck boat to put on their life jackets and they do, if the boat capsizes and starts to sink, those life jackets force them upward, which they are designed to do,” Duffy said. “But it is forcing them into the canopy. That’s why we have repeatedly called for a ban on the duck boats and why we call them a death trap.”

The Coast Guard said 22 duck boats were in Missouri and that each was inspected yearly. A spokeswoman said the boat that capsized Thursday had been inspected in the past 12 months, although she didn’t know the specific date.