Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations –26th March 2021

Case name: 2021_03_26-WM578

Situation: 8 travellers departed from Oran and arrived in Almeira, Spain.

Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded

Place of Incident: Western Mediterranean Sea

Summary of the Case: At 22:00h CET the evening of friday the 26h of March the Alarm Phone was alerted by a relative of a traveller to a boat in distress carrying 8 people. According to the relative, while he did not have a GPS position, the boat was 20km from Almeria. They had departed from Oran, Algeria, the previous night, and the boat was not out of fuel. At 22:07h our shift team called the Spanish coastguard Salvamento Marittimo (SM) and passed on all the information we had. Our shift team tried to contact the travellers
several times but they were always unreachable. At 23:00h we were called again by the relative of one of the travellers, who told us that the travellers’ phone was out of battery, however the last time he managed to speak to the them he was told that they were near Cabo de Gata. Soon after we passed on this information to SM. At 00:25 we called SM, however the officer said they had no news about this case and that they could not act without a GPS position. The following morning, when we called SM in Almeira, the officer told us that 5-6 hours earlier they had rescued a boat , which was drifting 20 km from the coast. We were also told that on the previous day 7 or 8 boats had arrived autonomously. We believed that this probably included our case. We told this to the relative of the travellers, who told us he would try to confirm. In the evening we received confirmation from the relative that the travellers arrived in Spain and were all ok and with the red cross.