I don’t mind emergency services being deployed, but they need to be evenly deployed. The higher priority was hundreds of drowning immigrants.
… in an uncoordinated nighttime voyage on an overloaded unlit blind boat …
In order to remain hidden as long as possible for a better chance to sneak into a country, they’re doing about as many things wrong as possible, including severely impacting the ability of rescue craft to get onsite in time.
Is the biggest risk still hypothermia in the warmer climes, if victims don’t drown immediately? Either case presents a really short window for rescue.
I have no sympathy for Stockton Rush whatsoever, but search and rescue services are basic, essential, and should never be provided at a cost.
Search and rescue does not normally include anywhere near the extent of services given to looking for a lost private submarine.
What, then, is the appropriate amount of resources to spend on five people lost at sea in a fairly well-defined area?
Why are you asking me? I don’t know anything about the field. However, a quick search shows this was one of the most expensive S&Rs of all time, comparable to efforts in rescuing 33 stranded miners in chile, who were victims of an accident rather than their own decisions. My point is only that saying “search and rescue is important” doesn’t really work as well when we’re talking about people who consciously got themselves into an incredibly dangerous and unrescuable situation. I’d fully support sending out normal coast guard searches as we would for a lost boat, for example.
Put differently, if five people took a sailboat out into rough waters and lost contact, would several countries spend tens of millions of dollars looking for the wreckage? If not, then why would we do it for this case?
This is entirely notwithstanding that there’s immediate comparable evidence that the S&R was because the passengers were rich, since the coinciding disaster with the refugee boat near greece didn’t merit even a fraction of that amount of resource expenditure, so it’s pretty hollow to act like this was the normal response.
Due to the absolutely spectacular dumbassery involved in this OG should pay up.
