Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 27th of August 2017

Case name: 2017_08_27-WM154
Situation: Alarm Phone alerted to emergency situation in the Western Med
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Western Mediterranean Sea

Summary of the Case: On Sunday the 27th of August 2017, our Alarm Phone shift team was contacted at 8.22am from a boat that had left from Tangier/Morocco with 7 people on board, including 2 women, one of whom was pregnant. They were on a yellow-blue plastic boat and had lost orientation. The battery of their phone was running low and they were urgently asking for assistance. At 8.45am we reached out to Salvamento Maritimo (S.M.), the Spanish search and rescue organisation, which had already received some information about this distress case. About an hour later, the Spanish authorities confirmed that they were searching for them. In an exchange with the travellers at 10.12am, they stated that they were unable to send us their GPS location and that they had not yet heard from S.M..

Around noon, the Spanish authorities informed us that they had also notified the Moroccan Navy. Shortly after, the travellers informed us that they could see two vessels on the Moroccan side, and we passed this information on to S.M. At 2.25pm, the travellers informed us that they were still in distress and that an orange boat was nearby but apparently not seeing them. We informed S.M. about this. We tried to reach the travellers several times in the following hours, but their phone seemed to be off. In the evening, at around 9pm, S.M. informed us that they had found a boat in the afternoon, carrying 10 people. Unable to confirm whether this was the boat in question, they stated that they would continue the search. The next day, someone picked up the phone briefly but we were not able to communicate.

Two days later, we were finally able to reach them. They told us that they had tried to forward us their GPS position but their phone was wet and did not function properly. In the end, some Moroccan fishermen helped them return to Morocco and they reached Morocco all unharmed.