[van id=”us/2018/07/21/tia-coleman-duck-boat-survivor-bts-nr-vpx.cnn”]
BRANSON, Mo. (AP) A former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board says duck boats aren’t designed for commercial recreational use.
James Hall said Saturday that the boat’s design makes the World War II-era vessels prone to the kind of accidents that led to the sinking of a duck boat Thursday on a Missouri lake. The sinking killed 17 people .
Hall says the amphibious vessel should be banned from such use. He says he doesn’t believe there’s a way to make the vehicles safe, particularly in bad weather conditions.
He says ducks boats are an amphibious vehicle designed for an assault on beaches.
Most oversight for the vessels is provided by the U.S. Coast Guard, but Hall says the Coast Guard isn’t staffed properly to provide the type of strict oversight necessary to ensure such operations are safe.
Hall was appointed chairman of the NTSB in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. He served as its chairman from 1994 to 2001
Meanwhile, an Indiana woman who survived a Missouri boating accident that killed nine of her family members says she remembers being in icy cold water, thinking about her children and saying: “If they don’t make it Lord, take me, too. I don’t need to be here.’”
Tia Coleman spoke through tears Saturday at a hospital where she’s recovering in Branson. Three of her children were among the 17 people killed when a duck boat capsized during a storm Thursday in a local lake.
Coleman says didn’t become nervous until a large swell came over the side of the boat. She says she doesn’t know how she ended up in the water and may have hit her head.
She says the cold water led her to believe she was deep in the lake. She says she “just let go” and somehow floated to the top of the water, where she saw life rafts that had been thrown into the lake by people nearby.
She says not knowing where her children were was “the worst feeling you could ever feel.”
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