Search Expert Applauds Province-Wide Drive to Continue Searching for Missing National League Fishermen | The Canadian News

A retired coast guard search and rescue coordinator says a surge of support across the province for two missing Labrador fishermen and their families has resulted in one of the most impressive recovery efforts he has ever seen.

With several aircraft, a coast guard ship and a high-tech sonar boat en route to assist the RCMP’s efforts, Merv Wiseman said the effort at this point should be the standard rather than the exception. And it shouldn’t have taken widespread outrage, protests and press releases from politicians to get here, he said in an interview Thursday.

“It shouldn’t have to be this way,” Wiseman said. “And I think we have to keep hammering…. This is what we’ve been looking for. “

Labrador does not have a dedicated search and rescue unit, which means that emergency response is often dependent on the availability of planes and ships that can help until the coast guard ships arrive, he said. And once a search is handed over to law enforcement as a recovery mission, efforts often decline quickly, Wiseman said.

He said the disappearance of Marc Russell and Joey Jenkins off the southeast coast of Labrador has shed light on these issues, and he hopes it will lead to systemic change.

The two men did not return home after leaving the small Labrador community of Mary’s Harbor aboard the Island Lady last Friday to fish for cod. Her disappearance has torn apart her community of about 340 people and sparked candlelight vigils at fishing piers as far away as Portugal Cove, outside St. John’s.

Fishing is dangerous and often deadly: Seven fishermen in the province have died on the job since January 2020, figures from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada show, and the communities of Newfoundland and Labrador are very familiar. With the pain that now takes hold of Mary’s Harbor.

After the Halifax Joint Rescue Coordination Center, run by the Canadian Forces and Coast Guard, announced Sunday that it would hand over the search to the RCMP as a recovery mission, there was a protest outside the Coast Guard offices in St. John’s. The provincial Progressive Conservatives urged the provincial government to intervene, and the Labrador NunatuKavut Community Council asked the JRCC to keep looking.

As of Thursday, the Canadian Coast Guard ship Captain Molly Kool was still searching with the support of provincial planes carrying trained spotters, according to a press release from the RCMP. Divers with the RCMP underwater recovery team and a search and rescue team equipped with a side scan sonar device were expected to join the search on Thursday, and the proprietary high-tech sonar vessel was expected to join the search. from Kraken Robotics will arrive Thursday afternoon.

That level of effort, especially for a recovery mission, “is the kind of effort that I haven’t seen in a long, long time, if I’ve ever seen it,” Wiseman said. “I think that’s due to all the backtracking.”

Claude Rumbolt lives in Mary’s Harbor, where he worked with the Fish, Food and Allied Workers union for decades and was directly involved in the development of the crab and shrimp fisheries after the closure of the cod fishery in 1992.

“Everybody is still holding out their hopes, but time is running out,” he said in an interview Wednesday about how people in the city were dealing with the situation. “It is difficult to lose someone, especially when young people are lost, and young people who were just getting into fishing on their own.”

Rumbolt said he was always proud that no one got lost in the shrimp and crab fisheries he helped develop in that area. “And now that this is happening on our doorstep, it is quite difficult,” he said.

He agrees with Wiseman that the disappearance of Russell and Jenkins has brought Labrador’s lack of dedicated search and rescue units to the fore, and he also hopes this tragedy will bring about change.

Rumbolt said he never understood why there are no dedicated rescue services in Labrador, given the region’s sizeable fishing industry and extensive coastline. There are about 300 collectors with the FFAW union and about 100 fishing companies on the 400-kilometer stretch from L’Anse-au-Clair, along the Quebec border, to the town of Cartwright, a union spokesman said in an email on Thursday.

Mary’s Harbor is located halfway between those two towns.

“I hope this is a wake-up call for everyone to keep looking at what to do with search and rescue on this coast … so that we have something here when it’s needed,” Rumbolt said, noting that as the weather changes. , the ocean is changing. “As we move forward with a fishery in the future, we will probably run into more obstacles than we have today.”

This Canadian Press report was first published on September 22, 2021.