Grand plan to the rescue

WHAT with Google Earth, satellite surveillance and pictures of this and that from space, we are given the impression that the world has somewhat shrunk.
We have brilliant communications, too and that promotes the notion that little goes on outside the reach of the electronic ears and eyes that dominate 21st century life.
But the oceans of the world remain very large, despite all this technological oversight.
If anyone doubts this, all the nonsense on stilts that is the Somali piracy problem ought to bring it home with a vengeance, with pirates and their motherships effectively vanishing in the depths of the north-west Indian Ocean, ranging around looking for their prey, despite all the amazing equipment on the warships tasked to look for them and protect merchant shipping.
You will find shipping along the great circle routes between ports, but even that is widely dispersed, and it is not at all unusual to make an ocean passage without seeing any other ship.
New Zealand to Panama, there would be 18 days or so without sighting a single masthead. It wasn’t exactly stimulating, but then why should it be, when pictures of the earth viewed from over the Pacific show only blue, with the coast of Australia the only large land mass?
People still get into trouble at sea. Ships disappear from time to time. It is not that long ago that fully laden capesizes were vanishing, and nobody even knew where to start looking.
The less well-found, such as fishing boats, still disappear, fishermen get swept away from their remote Pacific islands and yachtsmen still can perish on their ocean passages.
It was, we are reminded, just 40 years ago that a young British India officer, Robin Knox-Johnston, en route to his triumphant solo non-stop circumnavigation, reappeared after months of radio silence when nobody knew whether he was alive or dead.
It is also worth considering the hundreds of refugees, escapees and so-called economic migrants desperately trying to escape their awful lives for a new life on the other side of a sea or ocean and suffering often dreadful fates in the process.
All of which is why we need a global plan for search and rescue, if for no other reason than to ensure that if you are in desperate straits at sea in one part of the world, you are not more disadvantaged than you would be in the same circumstances elsewhere.
It is not an unreasonable demand, that if you are in distress at sea, somebody will know about your plight and dispatch competent assistance as soon as possible.
You could argue that it is a mark of civilisation, and the use of our modern technology for a very decent purpose.
Until the adoption in 1979 of the International Convention on Maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), there was no international system covering such operations.
It did not mean that there were no facilities; individual countries did what they thought best and systems like Amver were well-established.
But there were many areas where the nearest country had no plans or systems in place to address distress at sea.
It was all a bit of a lottery as to whether your distress call fell on deaf ears, as your fate rested on the competence and capability of the receiver of your call for help.
SAR is also an area of expertise where cooperation counts and the SAR Convention provided for an integrated system that deals with procedures, communication and systems that will optimise intervention in responding to distress.
If the SAR Convention provides the framework for this response, the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS) provides the means of communication. Think of it as a tool, an electronic lifeboat, as it were.
In a world where there are enormous divisions between the developed and the developing nations, any global approach to SAR has of necessity been incremental.
It is one thing to have available procedures and manuals, but if the necessary resources are not available, the distressed folk at sea may well wait in vain for rescue.
The convention provides for a worldwide network of Maritime Rescue and Coordination Centres (MRCCs) and sub-centres. The world is divided neatly into search and rescue areas, according to a global SAR plan.
The convention imposes obligations on coastal states which may well have slowed implementation and in 1998 a revised SAR plan was adopted.
This more pragmatic approach clarifies the responsibilities of governments, puts emphasis on regions and provides for coordination and cooperation between maritime and aeronautical SAR operations.
This has now been ratified by 94 countries, whose merchant fleets represent nearly 60% of the world’s tonnage.
Under its terms, parties are required to establish rescue coordination centres either individually or in cooperation with other states and to operate them on a 24/7 basis with trained staff who have a working knowledge of English.
Regional centres
Gradually the SAR network has been extended across the world’s oceans. An important conference in Fremantle in 1998 focused upon an integrated plan for the Indian Ocean, following along from other seminars and conferences that have developed provisional plans for other sea and ocean areas.
In 2000 there was another important conference in Florence that addressed the SAR problems of those parts of Africa not facing the Mediterranean.
Here, a regional approach to SAR provision was agreed, it being suggested that from Morocco round to Somalia five regional centres and 26 sub-centres would be established to cover the entire coastline and its sea areas.
Since the Florence conference, the provision of SAR services has been gradually developing for this huge coastline of east, west and southern Africa.
Last month saw IMO secretary-general Efthimios Mitropoulos in Monrovia, Liberia, for the commissioning of the regional MRCC which will coordinate, in cooperation with the national authorities concerned, SAR operations in the SRRs of Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast and Ghana.
May 2008 saw Lagos, Nigeria, commissioned as the regional MRCC, while in January 2007 the Cape Town MRCC was commissioned.
The first of the African regional MRCCs had been commissioned in Mombasa Kenya in May 2006, with Dar es Salaam and Victoria, Seychelles, sub-centres commissioned in March 2009.
There is still no rescue coordination centre in Somalia, for very obvious reasons and the Moroccan regional MRCC has yet to be established, where it is intended to upgrade an existing Moroccan centre.
Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, the Gambia, Cape Verde and Guinea Bisseau are developing an agreement, after which IMO will be able to support them in the establishment of the centre and sub-centres.
The role of IMO in this process is vital. It drives the program and is the coordinator of technical assistance, whether the provision of facilities or the training of the people who will operate them.
Most of these African nations have serious problems of resources. In 2004, with the question of how such countries could afford their contribution to the global search and rescue plan very much in mind, the IMO Council approved the establishment of an international SAR fund to cover the establishment of the African centres.
It is a multi-donor trust fund, operated under the auspices of the secretary-general, which will put into place “an adequate SAR infrastructure”.
It is a humanitarian effort, which arguably deserves a lot of support from those able to assist. Donations have come from such as the Union of Greek Shipowners and Nera Satellite Communication of Norway, while funds were also used from the IMO’s Tsunami Maritime Relief Fund to assist in the establishment of the Mombasa MRCC.
IMO member governments have been invited to make available their national maritime SAR training facilities to help with the training of search and rescue and GMDSS personnel of states in the eastern, southern, western and central African sub-regions and they have been asked to sponsor fellowships for such training.
Refugees
It is a very practical program, employing those who have the expertise and equipment to provide technical assistance to help others bring themselves up to an acceptable level.
And at the end of the day, it is helping to fill in a few more pieces of the global SAR plan jigsaw that will hopefully ensure a uniform level of coverage over all the world’s seas and oceans.
But while the network of search and rescue is vital, the whole integrity of the system is put at risk if those rescued cannot be landed, as it turns out when they are asylum seekers or refugees.
It is a huge problem, with incidents reported to the IMO between 1999 and 2008 involving 61,413 migrants, which most will acknowledge is just a sample of the reality.
It has complicated the whole business of providing assistance which, let’s face it, was once regarded as a wholly moral obligation about which no master would have thought twice.
But the world has moved on and life is rather more complicated. It requires the IMO to remind us of our obligations to our fellow human beings. If that’s what it takes.