The owner of the tour company involved in the fatal duck boat accident said the vessel should’ve never been in the water because of the rough conditions brought on by a violent storm.

“I don’t have all the details, but to answer your question, no, it shouldn’t have been in the water if, if what happened, happened,” Jim Pattison Jr., the president of Ripley Entertainment, said on CBS News Friday morning.

Pattison said Ripley – which owns the Ride the Ducks boat — has been in business for 47 years and has never had a deadly incident.

“To the best of our knowledge – and we don’t have a lot of information now – but it was a fast-moving storm that came out of basically nowhere is sort of the verbal analysis I’ve got,” he said.

Pattison said the amphibious boats come equipped with life jackets – but that passengers aren’t required by law to wear them. It’s unclear whether any of the 31 passengers on the watercraft were wearing life vests when it went down Thursday night on Table Rock Lake in Branson.

The Stone County Sheriff’s Office said 17 people — including children and the boat’s driver — are confirmed dead. Fourteen survived, including seven who were hospitalized.

Pattison said the captain of the boat, who survived, had 16 years of experience. The trip around the usually calm lake is quick, he said.

“They go in and kind of around an island and back. We had other boats in the water earlier and it had been a great, sort of calm experience,” Pattison said.

“You know, they have a very good record,” he added about the Ride the Ducks company. “So, again, this seems to be sort of almost a micro storm effect of something that no one was expecting to happen the way that it did.”

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