Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 05th of May 2018

Case name: 2018_05_05-WM224
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 Saturday the 5th of May 2018, our Alarm Phone shift team was alerted at 6.20am by a contact person to a boat in distress in the Western Mediterranean Sea. The boat had left at 11pm the night before from Tangier and carried 8 people, including 1 woman. We spoke to the travellers at 6.27am but due to the wind in the background it was difficult to understand them. We asked them to forward their GPS position to us. When we did not hear back, we reached out to the Spanish search and rescue organisation Salvamento Maritimo (SM) at 6.42am. They had heard about the case and were already searching for the boat but had also not yet received a GPS position. We told them that we would try to receive the GPS position from the travellers. However, we were not able to reach them as the phone appeared to be turned off. We learned through our contact person at 7.10am that the phone with an internet connection on the boat had gone wet and lost connection. At 7.20am we received the information that the travellers could see a white and red boat near them. We found what appeared to be this boat on real-time vessel tracking websites. We spoke at 7.40am to SM and they stated that they were quite far away from the location of that boat. They asked us to ask the travellers whether they might also be able to see another vessel near them, the Poeta Lopez Anglada. At 7.49am, the travellers informed our contact person that they could not be sure about what boat this was as it was far away from them. At 8.03am, they detected another boat, the La Surprise. We passed the information to SM. At 8.33am, the travellers stated that they had seen a Search and Rescue aircraft – a piece of information we passed on to SM once again. At 8.45am our contact person confirmed that the travellers had boarded the Spanish rescue vessel and were all safe.