KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ Members of the U.S. Coast Guard on Monday morning raised the duck boat that sank to the bottom of Table Rock Lake, killing 17 people.
At about 10:10 a.m. local time, the top of the boat broke the surface of the water. Orange life jackets were entwined in its opened roof. Two American flags remained intact on the front of the boat.
The boat sank Thursday night when storm-driven waves overwhelmed the craft on the lake near Branson. Five children were among the people killed.
The boat company, Ride the Ducks, is coordinating the recovery efforts and the Coast Guard is overseeing the operation. Once the boat is ashore, it will be taken to a secure facility as part of the investigation into the sinking.
The National Transportation Safety Board is conducting the investigation and will hold the boat in its custody.
Under a sunny sky, a Missouri Highway Patrol boat ferried a team of divers to the salvage site.
Divers entered the water shortly before 9:30 a.m. and attached cables to the sunken boat, which rests about 80 feet below the surface. A crane on a barge began lifting the boat to the surface shortly after 10 a.m.
The salvage efforts are taking place about 200 yards from the concrete ramp that the duck boat was trying to reach in Thursday's storm.
The recovery efforts were expected to take a couple of hours, but they proceeded more swiftly than expected.
Once the boat was brought to the surface, crews began pumping out water. They raised the front end to drain out more water. The plan called to drain the water and then see if it would float so it could be towed to shore by another boat.
By 10:25 a.m., crews headed for shore.
During a news conference shortly after 10:35 a.m., Capt. Scott Stoermer with the Coast Guard said divers have photographed the boat where it lay at the bottom of the lake.
Crews were getting ready to hoist it onto a flat bed truck so it could be turned over to the NTSB so the agency could continue its investigation.
A major emphasis of the investigation would look into whether the captain of the boat followed the Ride the Ducks' guidelines regarding weather warnings and the use of life jackets, Stoermer said.
On Saturday, investigators retrieved a video recorder from the sunken duck boat and sent it to Washington, D.C., for analysis. They also obtained video recorders from a second duck boat that had made it safely to shore and from the Showboat Branson Belle, which was docked nearby when the duck boat submerged.
