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Safety and Training

Reality TV Meets Rescue at Sea

01 Nov 2006

Advances in Personal Locater Beacon (PLB) technology have made transmission, location and rescue faster than ever before, a fact which became apparent to French journalist Daniel GrandClement after he was thrown into heavy seas off the coast of Yemen last month.

Daniel GrandClement (third right) is reunited with Philippe Winum of Sierra Echo, who rented the PLB to him; Dominque Flaus, the FMCC operator who responded to his signal; and Dennis London, European sales manager for ACR. Photo taken at FMCC Toulouse, courtesy of CNES.
Daniel GrandClement (third right) is reunited with Philippe Winum of Sierra Echo, who rented the PLB to him; Dominque Flaus, the FMCC operator who responded to his signal; and Dennis London, European sales manager for ACR. Photo taken at FMCC Toulouse, courtesy of CNES.

GrandClement was covering the migration of refugees from the shores of Somalia to neighbouring Yemen for the well known French TV show ‘Thalassa’. In an effort to bring genuine reality to television, he joined a 12m boat loaded with 8 crew and 120 passengers when it set off from Somalia in conditions so severe that even the crew were distressed.

GrandClement had previously produced a lengthy report about search and rescue at sea, so knew how important it was to be quickly and precisely located in case of distress. Knowing the voyage would be perilous, he had rented an ACR AquaFix 406 I/O PLB. Just as well, for as the boat neared the Yemen coast, the human traffickers capsized it to get rid of the passengers. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), some 1,500 refugees died in similar circumstances last year.

GrandClement activated the PLB at 19:14. Within seconds the COSPAS-SARSAT satellite relayed the AquaFix 406 MHz signal to the French Mission Coordination Centre (FMCC) in Toulouse, where GrandClement’s rented PLB registration data was maintained. The FMCC routed the alert message to the Foreign Ministry in Paris for verification. The officer on duty called the ‘Point of Contact’ that GrandClement listed on the PLB registration form. From this moment onward, things happened very quickly. The consul at the French Embasy in Sanaa received the alert message and contacted the Yemeni Coast Guard, which directed a search party to the rescue site.

Meanwhile, GrandClement managed to swim to shore, where he was picked up by the Yemeni rescue party. Yemeni authorities confirmed the reporter’s rescue to the consul at the French Embassy in Sanaa. GrandClement’s signal resulted in all of the refugees also being rescued and taken into care by the UNHCR.

‘Everything worked very well, said GrandClement. ‘All the people to warn were warned. I received total support from the French authorities in Sanaa.’

The episode confirms the value of ACR Electronics’ product. The AquaFix 406 PLB broadcasts critical GPS coordinates, providing SAR crews with latitude and longitude to increase emergency response speed by pinpointing positioning to within 100m. The COSPAS-SARSAT satellites also locate the PLB using a technique based on the Doppler Shift principle for redundancy and reliability.

Worldwide, the COSPAS-SARSAT satellite system has led to the rescue of 20,300 people since its inception in 1982.

MJ Information No: 22404

Images for this article - click to enlarge

Daniel GrandClement (third right) is reunited with Philippe Winum of Sierra Echo, who rented the PLB to him; Dominque Flaus, the FMCC operator who responded to his signal; and Dennis London, European sales manager for ACR. Photo taken at FMCC Toulouse, courtesy of CNES.

Unless otherwise stated, all images copyright © Mercator Media 2008. This does not exclude the owner's assertion of copyright over the material.

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