A U.S. Coast Guard HC-130J Hercules aircraft parked on the flightline at Air Station Barbers Point, Oahu, Hawaii, Aug. 15, 2024. (Joseph Pagan/U.S. Air National Guard)
Search aircraft and patrol boats from the U.S. and the Marshall Islands continued searching Friday for a sea ambulance and its crew of four reported missing in Micronesian waters five days earlier.
The 37-foot fiberglass vessel departed the Marshall Islands capital of Majuro for Mili Atoll, 75 miles to the southeast, at midday Monday and did not return by evening as planned, according to a news release Tuesday from the Marshall Islands Ministry of Health and Human Services. The crew was en route to a mass tuberculosis screening campaign, according to the ministry.
“We’re still looking, but we haven’t found them,” Chief Warrant Officer Sara Muir, spokeswoman for U.S. Coast Guard Forces Micronesia, Sector Guam, told Stars and Stripes by phone Friday.
The vessel is equipped with communication and navigation systems to send a distress call, although no distress signal had been received as of Friday, according to New Zealand public radio RNZ Pacific. RNZ cited the Marshall Islands Ministry of Health and Human Services.
The situation is critical, ministry spokesperson Charles Lomae told the station.
The search is coordinated by the U.S. Coast Guard Joint Rescue Coordination Center in Honolulu, according to a Coast Guard search update Thursday.
A Navy P-8 Poseidon reconnaissance plane from Kadena Air Base, Japan, and a Coast Guard HC-130 Hercules aircraft from Naval Air Station Barbers Point, Hawaii, are conducting an aerial search with two Marshall Islands Sea Patrol vessels at sea, according to the Coast Guard.
“Searching for this vessel across the remote expanses of the Pacific tests aircrews with extreme distances and challenging conditions, but our shared commitment to this sea-connected community drives us,” Muir said in the update. “The people of the Pacific islands, seasoned mariners with remarkable resilience, inspire us to persist in these efforts, even when sightings remain elusive.”
The Poseidon crew searched Wednesday for three hours with no sightings before returning to Guam for fuel and crew rest, according to the Coast Guard.
The Hercules crew deployed three marker buoys and scoured the area for three hours the same day, yielding no findings, before heading to Kwajalein Atoll to rest and refuel. The marker buoys transmit GPS data on sea conditions and enable precise search planning.
The Marshall Islands vessels conducted searches the same day but also reported no sightings.
Anyone with relevant information or sightings that may help responders is asked to contact the JRCC watch toll-free at 1-800-331-6176.
