Skipper Matteo Russo and his father-in-law, John Orlando, died early the morning of 3 January when their 16.5-m trawler, Patriot, sank somewhere off Gloucester, Massachusetts in fair weather and moderate sea.
The Patriot was by no means an old bucket. Skipper Russo had recently reconditioned and equipped the 11-year old boat with up-to-date communications and survival equipment, including a radio-fire-alarm system. Last month the Patriot passed her voluntary inspection conducted by the US Coast Guard (USCG). She was also carrying a VMS, (Vehicle Monitoring System), a satellite-based tracking device, reporting the vessel’s position every 30 minutes to a shore tracking station, which is mandatory on most of the Gloucester-based trawlers working under US federal groundfish permits.
The sinking was rapid, given that both men, whose bodies were found hours later, had no time to don their survival suits. The Patriot was located resting on her side at a depth of 34m. A remote-controlled underwater recording and still photography of the wreck couldn’t provide an answer as to the cause of the sinking. There was no apparent sign of fire, strike, or damage. The propeller and rudder were in place, and both trawl doors were on board.
While I am writing these words USCG, prompted by the victim’s family, the Gloucester fishing community and their representatives, is looking for, but is still ignorant of the causes of the sinking. The only available hypothesis at the moment is that the Patriot might have hit a heavy cable, hundreds of metres long, by which a huge 130m oceanic tug, passing in the vicinity of Patriot’s location was towing a heavy barge.
The Patriot’s sinking is hardly spectacular. Nothing like the one of the ‘Perfect Storm’, nothing like the recent one of Alaska Ranger with 42 crew-members in water, or the other recent disaster of Kingfisher, which sunk off South Africa’s Eastern Cape, leaving five survivors and 14 crew-members unaccounted for and assumed lost. But here was just one smallish trawler and two fishermen dead.
So, why am I writing all this? Because there’s a problem here – the late start of the search-and-rescue operation (S&R). What happened is that it took the Coast Guard, which otherwise is giving mariners fast, efficient and brave S&R service, some two-and-a-half hour to move, a delay, which is widely discussed in Gloucester and investigated by the authorities. This problem, however dealt with in the USA, must be of major interest to all countries whose fishing vessels are obliged, or may be obliged in the future, to carry VMS or similar devices for the purpose of enforcement of fishery management rules. I’m writing this with the hope that after what had happened at Gloucester, such delays or deferments would never occur elsewhere.
The bulk of the facts this piece is based on come from the Gloucester Daily Times on-line and and USCG. What hit my eye was reading of the stretch of time that passed since the USCG had been informed and the time when it took action.
The emergency started when the skipper’s wife was alerted at 1:35am at her home by the fire alarm, which came by radio from the Patriot. Having tried in vain to contact her husband or her father by radio, she called the USCG, but was unable to persuade them to begin S&R operations immediately. The only thing the USCG did was to check to see if the Patriot was at its berth in the harbour. Only at about 4am the USCG sent out a helicopter and two boats on a S&R mission.
Now, imagine: there’s a VMS reception centre at the fishery service (NMFS), where information on the positioning of all vessels carrying VMS is received every 30 minutes. This information normally should be available directly to the USCG, which needs it both for the sake of enforcement and for the sake of search and rescue. In the past, in another search and rescue mission, the USCG used the VMS system quite efficiently. For some reason, just two months later, in the case of the Patriot, USCG did not use the VMS system timely. In Gloucester, fishing people speculate that some bureaucratic feet dragging, and/or lack of standard code of reaction to emergency resulted in the, perhaps, crucial delay, and they want an explanation why the USCG didn’t use this otherwise efficient system as soon as they were informed on the fire alarm.
The VMS was introduced to fishermen as a life-saving tool. This is because, instead of searching large areas of ocean, S&R would be able to narrowly focus on the vessel-in-distress approximate location, owing to the VMS position reports. No doubt, a local investigation and lessons drawing are a must for the future safety of the Gloucester’s and other American fishing fleets.
Notwithstanding, however, this and similar systems all over the world should be so organised and fine-tuned to the possibilities of dangers and disaster at sea that no one could say the same as the Gloucester fisherman who said that “there is a great disparity in how VMS is used and that there’s a bias toward protecting fish rather than human life”.
It appears that an agreement, as that signed by USCG and NMFS, saying that the VMS technology is designed to be used for both enforcement and search-and-rescue efforts is insufficient for ensuring that saving human life must take preference over any other duties and assignments. Wherever a VMS system is employed, there must be an explicit procedure prescribing how to react to emergencies, especially when alarm signals have been received. It is, in my opinion, also absolutely imperative that the organisation responsible for S&R operations has a direct immediate access to VMS data in true time. It is unthinkable that a technology, which is so successfully used to monitor and police fishing operations wouldn’t be equally fast and efficiently employed the to locate vessels in distress.
