This is, I suppose, an occupational hazard.
The Ocean Ranger inquiry recommended that there be a search and rescue based in St. John's, or as they put it, in the port nearest to the offshore. St. John's happens to be that port. The inquiry said it should be “provided by either government or industry”.
What happened over the years was that there was no dedicated helicopter provided for search and rescue. Rather, there was a standby helicopter that had to be reconfigured before it set off. This was important in the tragedy that occurred in March. Word came that a helicopter was in trouble, and then it very shortly afterward crashed, but a helicopter had to be reconfigured. That took 45 minutes, so it didn't leave the ground until 50 minutes after the word came in. The accident was 30 nautical miles offshore, which is about 45 kilometres. There was a 50-minute delay before the helicopter took off, and then it took 22 minutes to get to the scene, so it was about 76 minutes before it got there and was in a position to rescue.
The other thing I should mention--and I'll mention very quickly why this is important--is that my inquiries have led me to believe that our offshore waters are the most hostile in the offshore oil world. The North Sea is the nearest comparator, but our waters are colder than the North Sea because of the Labrador current. Because of the jet stream pulling in low-pressure systems, our winds tend to be consistently higher. Our waters are bitterly cold, the winds are high, and fog is frequent, so the whole panoply of the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador offshore is, I believe, more dangerous than offshore areas elsewhere in the world because of natural conditions.
It means that we, in my opinion--and I've made this very clear in my report--need search and rescue that is second to none. As I learned more, and as I learned more about the North Sea, I began to learn that response times in the North Sea and elsewhere in the world--and interestingly, elsewhere in Canada, although we and Nova Scotia have the only offshores in Canada at this time--are a lot less than the hour we had. In the Gulf of Mexico, response times were 15 to 20 minutes instead of the hour that we had. It was because the helicopter as provided by the industry had to be reconfigured. This concerned me.
After reading what happened in other jurisdictions--not in every jurisdiction, because I tended to concentrate on the North Sea as the nearest comparator--and seeing the evidence that was laid before the inquiry about search and rescue times and what was possible, I became very concerned. I made an interim recommendation, which the terms of reference allowed me to do, in February of last year, 11 months ago. I recommended that although the inquiry was not finished, we should start right away to work toward a 15-minute to 20-minute response and a fully dedicated helicopter.
I must say that the C-NLOPB board rose to the occasion, and the oil operators rose to the occasion. I knew that it would take some time to do this, because a helicopter would have to be acquired--another S-92--in the circumstances. That took until July. To get to the 15-minute to 20-minute response time, there has to be a special hangar, and the helicopter has to be ready to go at all times. At the moment, we're down to half an hour, but when that hangar is constructed and everything is in place, we will be down to 15 minutes or 20 minutes.