He said a lot of what I would say.
I don't come prepared like that, George.
You know, I know you're dealing with facts, you're dealing with dollars, and you're dealing with fatalities. It's the fatalities part that I have a concern with, and it's the response time in itself that I have a problem with.
Six years ago I found out all too well what the gut-wrenching difference was going to be between 30 minutes pre-flight time and two hours. The Ryan's Commander had gone down. It had capsized off Spillars Cove. Now, I could sit here and could quote facts, as George has done. I could tell you about the studies that have already been done. But instead what I want to do is I want to represent my two brothers, Dave and Joe Ryan, who can no longer represent themselves, who sat for over three hours—three gruelling hours, by the way—in a life raft.
So the difference that night in the response times, what would it have meant? That was the perfect escape. All hands had got off the boat, which doesn't always happen. They had got off the boat and they had got into their life rafts. And they bobbed around for what seemed like endless timelines. To them it was also a false sense of security. They kept looking, they kept hoping, they kept thinking that the chopper was going to be there, and it was only a matter of time and they would be rescued. No big deal. That's what you'd expect if it was an ambulance you were waiting for, if it was a fire department and you had been waiting for the fire truck to show up. But what happened that night is the winds got worse, as often happens on this beautiful island that we live herein.
You know, earlier that day they had looked at the forecast, and there was really no reason why they should not have left Bay de Verde to head towards St. Brendan's. They had been out for hours. They had safely passed Baccalieu Trail. They came up through the Tickle. Everything was fine.
There were a lot of things that happened to that boat that night, and a lot of reasons why they happened, and that's an issue in itself that is not to be here. But as George said, you can implement as many safety measures.... That boat was $1.8 million and it did not last its first fishing season. That in itself is a problem, but when you add to that the winds and the location—they were trying to get around Cape Bonavista. I know geographically it's hard for you guys to imagine what the coastline looks like here, but you're smack dab in the middle of nowhere here in Gander, which is great, because you're smack dab in the middle of Newfoundland—other than the Labrador side.
With the timelines, with the winds, with everything that was happening that night, the rain, the stories that came back to me, the people who were onshore who were just looking over...there was a generator. They had to sit on the generator, guys, in order for the ground search and rescue to even be able to operate their lights. So yes, every second counts. And that night the difference could not have just been tenfold, but in my opinion a hundred-fold, because if they had got there prior to when they did, that life raft would have been in what I would consider to be a safer—if there is any such thing in the ocean—rescue zone. But instead they were so precariously close to the cliffs. And then guess what else happened? The chopper had problems.
Now I have nothing bad at all to say about the search and rescue personnel. They went above and beyond their call of duty that night. But when you have this snowball effect happen, it's like Murphy's Law. And nobody plans for disaster, nobody plans for catastrophes, nobody plans for that big ship to go down. But when it does go down, you have certain things that you've planted in your mind, certain protocols that you think are there. You get your mayday out, you get in the life raft. Everybody's okay; that in itself is a miracle.
But when you're there and all of a sudden time has passed, over three hours, and you realize that when you're looking out through that door of the life raft, you're getting closer and closer to shore, and you have only one or two more flares that you can send up, because you've used them all, time's up, guys. One person got out of that life raft that night safely, and even then there were a lot of problems. All of those problems are listed in here.
The problems were within search and rescue, within the protocol, within the timelines and the fact that by the time they had got there, every single minute meant life and death, because the life raft was actually in so close to the rocks, so close to those jagged cliffs down there. By the time they got my brother-in-law off the life raft, that was it. It tipped over, it was gone. Every man was to himself, and it was survival instinct that kicked in after that.
I can't imagine what it must have been like for my nephew to have to turn around and look at my brother and see him sitting there, knowing that he was going to be the next one to go up in that basket into the helicopter, to have to leave him there, or what it was like hanging on the cliff after, waiting for the Hercules to get there. Because with all the problems that they had with the helicopter...and that can happen, I understand that. But when it happened after being late getting there, after going to the wrong location when they had gotten there.... It just takes a little mistake or an error in judgment to have it mean that much more and be that much more detrimental--as my family all learned.
I went on to write this book, diary of a madwoman, I call it--and I am still mad, but you come to accept certain things. In addition to this book, I also had Scott do a petition. This book did somewhat over 8,000 copies, and this petition that we put out, pretty much single-handedly, with some help from some friends.... We had almost 20,000 names that had already gone before the House of Commons to get this search and rescue time to change.
I've been in business a lot of years and I understand it's about money, it's about making sense, but as George has often said, you can't put all the safety requirements on the fishery. It's not right. They've done just about everything they can imagine doing. And since the Ryan's Commander went down, there were four people who could tell a story. That doesn't often happen. But those four people did an account of everything they could think of. They pointed out everything that they thought they could have done, that could have been better that night. And the one big thing that they always came back to was that if only the chopper had gotten there 15 minutes before, 30 minutes before, it would have made the world of difference to us.
That's it for me.