Officer: Canadians waited 40 hours for Brazil rescue with boat 4 hours away

By AP
Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Canada officer says Brazil navy remiss

HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — The first officer of a sailing ship that capsized off Brazil’s coast said Wednesday he and 63 others on board could have been rescued within hours if Brazilian officials had ordered planes and other boats to assist the ailing vessel sooner.

Kim Smith said there was at least one other vessel within four hours of his training ship, the Concordia, just before it capsized and sunk on the afternoon of Feb. 17.

It took nearly 40 hours before merchant ships were able to safely rescue the 48 students and 16 crew members stranded in lifeboats several hundred miles (kilometers) off the Brazilian coast.

Brazilian officials should have been alerted immediately by the emergency beacon aboard the Concordia and responded more quickly, Smith said.

“There was a vessel within four hours of us and I know they received a distress call almost instantly,” Smith said from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, the home base for the Concordia.

“There could be a false signal, but when you see that there are 64 people involved you’d think they would step it up a little.”

The Brazilian navy has defended its response to a shipwreck that left the teenage students adrift on the ocean for two nights. The navy deployed a search aircraft about 19 hours after it received a distress signal from the SV Concordia, which officials say is in line with standard procedure.

A Brazilian navy spokesperson couldn’t immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday.

Navy spokeswoman Maria Padilha said last month that naval responders received a distress signal about 10 p.m. local time Wednesday (8 p.m. EST; 0100 GMT Thursday) and immediately tried to make radio contact with the vessel. They also communicated with nearby ships and aircraft to see if they could spot anything wrong in the area, Padilha said.

The aim was to assess what type of emergency had occurred, she said, given that it could have been anything from a minor engine problem to a grave illness or a sinking ship.

Navy Lt. Edward Stansfield, public affairs officer for the Canadian Maritime Forces Atlantic, has said the policy of Canada’s Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Halifax is to send planes immediately after receiving a distress signal from any ships offshore.

Officials with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada said response time will be one of the areas they examine in an independent investigation announced Wednesday into the sinking of the Concordia, which served as a floating classroom for students from around the world.

Ken Potter, manager of investigations for the marine branch of the TSB, said they are gathering information on a range of issues to determine what caused the ship to sink.

Smith said he was in his cabin when the 18-year-old vessel went violently slammed on its side twice in rapid sucession and making movement almost impossible.

He said he believes a so-called microburst, or vertical downdraft of wind, walloped the vessel without warning as it headed from Recife, Brazil to Uruguay.

William Curry, the ship’s captain, has called it a miracle that everyone on board made it into rafts and survived.

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