Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 19th of June 2018
Case name: 2018_06_19-WM265
Situation: Alarm Phone alerted to two boats in distress between Morocco and Spain
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Western Mediterranean Sea

Summary of the Case: On Tuesday the 19th of June, the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted to two boats in distress in the strait of Gibraltar. Both boats were rescued and brought to Spain.

At 7am CEST, the Alarm Phone shift team received information about a boat in distress. We called the travellers, and they were clearly in distress and panicked. They informed us they were 8 passengers in the boat, and had left from Cap Spartel at 2am Moroccan time. They asked us to call the Spanish search and rescue organisation Salvamento Maritimo (SM), but the connection was poor so it was impossible to establish their GPS position. The connection was interrupted, so we called SM to inform them about the case. They already had the information and the position of the boat. We continued to try to establish connection with the boat but they were not reachable. We called SM back, and they said the boat was in Moroccan waters, and asked us to call the Moroccan Rescue Center. We called them, and were informed that a rescue operation was already in progress, but it was not clear whether it was the same boat. We called the travellers back several times, and finally reached them and were told that the boat in question had been rescued by SM. We called SM and we received confirmation that the boat had been rescued to Spain.

At 9am CEST, The Alarm Phone was informed by a contact person about a boat of 4 people that departed around 2-3am Morocco time from near Tangier. They told us they were having urgent problems, but they didn’t have a smartphone and didn’t know how to send a position. We called the Spanish search and rescue organisation Salvamento Maritimo (SM) and alerted them to the distress of the travellers. At 11.30am, we called the Moroccan Marine Royale, and were told that they had already been alerted to the boat by SM. At 12 noon we were informed that there was a ship performing rescue operations near the travelers in the boat, and so we alerted SM to this fact. We called MR and SM again and were told that the boat had been rescued. We received confirmation that the travelers had been rescued to Spain.