Alive News

At least 13 people, including children, died after a boat carrying tourists capsized and sank on a lake during a thunderstorm in a country music mecca in southwest Missouri, authorities said Friday.

Missouri State Highway Patrol Sgt. Jason Pace said four people remain missing Friday after the Ride the Ducks boat sank on Table Rock Lake in Branson Thursday evening. He said 14 people survived, and that seven of them were injured.

Patrol divers found two more bodies early Friday, raising the death toll from 11 to 13, Pace said.

A spokeswoman for the Cox Medical Center Branson said four adults and three children arrived at the hospital shortly after the incident. Two adults are in critical condition and the others were treated for minor injuries, Brandei Clifton said.

Stone County Sheriff Doug Rader said Thursday that stormy weather likely made the boat capsize. Another duck boat on the lake made it safely back to shore.

Steve Lindenberg, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Springfield, Missouri, said the agency issued a severe thunderstorm warning for the Branson area Thursday evening. Lindenberg said winds reached speeds of more than 60 mph (100 kph).

“It’s a warning telling people to take shelter,” he said.

Rader said an off-duty sheriff’s deputy working security for the boat company helped rescue people after the boat capsized. Dive teams from several law enforcement agencies assisted in the effort.

The National Transportation Safety Board said investigators will arrive on the scene Friday morning.

Suzanne Smagala with Ripley Entertainment, which owns Ride the Ducks in Branson, said the company was assisting authorities with the rescue effort. Smagala added this was the Branson tour’s only accident in more than 40 years of operation.

Branson is about 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of Kansas City and is a popular vacation spot for families and other tourists looking for entertainment ranging from theme parks to live music. An EF2 tornado that bounced through downtown Branson in 2012 destroyed dozens of buildings and injured about three dozen people, but killed no one.

Duck boats, which can travel on land and in water, have been involved in other deadly incidents in the past. Five college students were killed in 2015 in Seattle when a duck boat collided with a bus, and 13 people died in 1999 when a duck boat sank near Hot Springs, Arkansas.

Safety advocates have sought improvements since the Arkansas deaths. Critics argued that part of the problem is that too many agencies regulate the boats with varying safety requirements.

Duck boats were originally used by the U.S. military in World War II to transport troops and supplies, and later were modified for use as sightseeing vehicles.

In the first six months of the year 2018, Nepal welcomed over 520,000 tourists from various parts of the globe.

The statistics of the Department of Immigration shows that the inflow was over by 13 percent compared to the corresponding period last year. In the same period in 2017, a total of 460,304 foreign tourists had visited Nepal.

The data shows that tourist arrivals were encouraging even in rainy season which is considered as ‘off season’ in view of tourism business. It may be noted that the Nepal Tourism Board had launched various sorts of tourism promotional programs aimed at bringing tourists to home.

Board chief executive officer Deepak Raj Joshi said an increase in the number of foreigners even during off season is obviously the good news for us.

Contributions of private sector could not be ignored to the increase in the influx of tourists.

Indian tourists make up the wider percentage in the figure of total arrivals. The latest data shows that 96,372 Indian tourists visited Nepal in the period while the number of Chinese was 71,379. The number of tourists from the United States of America was 43,816 and the figure of Japanese tourists was counted at 13, 851.

Nepal welcomed tourists from the South Asian countries, from European countries– Austria , Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Sweden– and other countries in the period.