It was only 25 seconds of time, but it will stay with Ann-Margret White forever.
White is 49 years old and from Corner Brook. She graduated University with a double degree in French and German. She started her career teaching high school French, waiting for full time employment, when her mother saw an ad in a local newspaper.
“This might be a job for you,” her mother said, “it’s a radio operator with Coast Guard and you need Grade 12 and French.”
Today she’s the Regional Director of Integrated Business Management Services for Canadian Coast Guard Atlantic Region, but she started out as a radio operator at a Coast Guard radio station — now called Marine Communications and Traffic Services (MCTS).
What exactly does a MCTS Officer do? In White’s words, “It’s a 24-7 job, responsible for monitoring and responding to distress, urgency and safety calls on both VHF and MF frequencies and satellite transmissions. Officers are also responsible for ensuring the safe routing of vessels in certain waters that are designated to have vessel traffic separation schemes.”
When White became a Coast Guard radio operator in 1991, satellite communications were not nearly as advanced nor as accessible as today.
“I’m going back to the day when there was still Morse code and we were sitting there hammering out on a Morse key,” she says. “Mother’s Day was always the busiest day for ship to shore radio telephony — hundreds of calls placed per day — which was a super busy time. That was the nature of the work, keeping the lines of communication open from vessels to shore.”
On January 16, 1998, Ann-Margret White was working the 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. night shift at the Stephenville Coast Guard Radio Station (CGRS) on the West Coast in Newfoundland.
“Back then it was a ‘single stand’ centre, which meant that on a day shift or a night shift there was one officer required on watch. During that night shift, I was the lone radio operator on at Stephenville CGRS responsible for the geographic area of the west coast of N.L., a portion of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Southwest coast of N.L.”
White says that sometimes a challenging part of her shift was the long periods of low radio activity. For this particular watch though, she was 10 hours into the night shift. “By 5 a.m. you’re doing a lot of pacing to stay alert, you’re trying to clue up and get your handover ready for that next officer who’s coming in to sign on watch from you at 7 a.m. I was walking the floor to pass the time and it so happened that I was passing in front of the console.”
The console shows the VHF and MF peripheral sites, with the frequencies associated with each peripheral site. When a call is received from a vessel, a light comes on and flashes green to show which peripheral site the call came in from.
“I was able to catch out of the corner my eye that the light snapped on and saw that it was from the Ramea VHF peripheral. No sooner was it there than it was gone. When the light snapped on, I heard what I knew to be, ‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Somebody help us.’”
Immediately White got into position, sat at her console, put on her headphones and got ready to copy whatever she was going to hear next.
White remembers the call well.
“It wasn’t picture-perfect; it was broken and intermittent — no different than somebody turning up and down the volume on the radio, on and off.”
She checked whether any of the other adjacent Coast Guard Radio Stations had received a better transmission. Hearing nothing, she went back and said, “What station calling Mayday? This is Stephenville Coast Guard Radio.”
Another broken radio transmission came through.
“From the audio call you can hear panic on the bridge or wherever the call originated from. There was chaos in the background and screaming. Was that a seven? What number was it? Whatever that latitude and longitude that was given, it was not easily discernible,” White recalls.
She radioed back to the vessel stating the best latitude and longitude that she had heard, to let them know that she had copied their distress call.
Another broken call from the ship in distress cut through the room with a fragmented latitude and longitude. White asked, “How many persons onboard?”
No answer.
The distress call, from a vessel with no name and no clear location, lasted only 25 seconds.
There was no further contact with the ship.
“We have procedures and that’s what comes top of mind,” White says. “You just operate according to those standard operating procedures, you do what you’re trained to do and you make sure that everybody stays informed with all the accurate and most timely information.”
White’s only information was a fragmented latitude and longitude from what sounded to be a much-panicked situation, but she knew exactly what to do with it.
“As a radio operator (now called MCTS Officers), what is most important is to move that information out to other parts of the organization so that the search and rescue system can be informed and they can determine what the next appropriate course of action will be. Analyze all the incoming information, task Coast Guard ships or other vessels of opportunity to the distress position, and work with the Joint Rescue Coordination Centre Halifax for air support.”
With the incident reported, White proceeded to, “rebroadcast the Mayday information and listen, trying to get any follow-up from that vessel or any vessel that may have heard anything.”
White was joined by other day workers. The officer in charge encouraged her to go home at the end of her shift. “‘We got this covered’, he said, ‘you go home, rest and we’ll talk to you again for your night shift.’”
No one at that time knew the magnitude of the call.
The distress call White heard was from a Cypriot-registered bulk carrier named the M/V Flare transiting in the Cabot Strait. It was travelling from Rotterdam to Montreal and during a vicious winter storm with seven-metre high seas, the vessel had split in two.
Some of the crewmembers on the sinking stern section saw the bow of another ship appear to approach them and were elated to think they’d be rescued. Elation would have quickly turned to despair to realize that it was the separated front half of their own vessel.
The propeller on the stern section had still been turning and had brought them back towards the bow. The stern section of the bulk carrier sank within 30 minutes while the bow remained afloat for days. The M/V Flare had a crew of 25 men. Four of them survived and 15 bodies were recovered. To this day, six remain missing.
“I remember wanting to know — did that gentleman who transmitted the Mayday call, did he survive? Was he rescued?”
The M/V Flare left an impression.
“I experienced first-hand what even such a short radio transmission can result in — the extensive search and rescue system was activated following that call. Regardless of whichever way distress or urgency information is received by the Coast Guard, there are highly trained professionals that will take that information and give one hundred and ten percent of their expertise to see the most successful resolution. There are a lot of people hard at work, both on our Coast Guard vessels and shore-based that want to get that best outcome possible and to save lives. That’s what we all signed up for.”
Each year when January 16 rolls around, Ann-Margret White turns her mind to the M/V Flare. “I always think of the weather that day, the cold Atlantic, and I hope that the survivors have found comfort and peace over the years. I always think what that must’ve been like for them that morning. I can say that I was very blessed that day to have been doing what I was doing, to have been standing where I was, and to have heard what I thought I heard.”
It was only 25 seconds in a day of her career but it is a memory that will last a lifetime.
