Tuesday, July 25, 2000
By CATHY ZOLLO, Staff Writer
The U.S. Coast Guard and Naples area police and fire boats spent hours in a thunderstorm Sunday night searching for a man who said his boat was sinking and his companions had drowned.
What searchers found when leading edge technology pinpointed the call's origin was the man, drunk and lying on the deck of a boat puttering in circles, said Petty Officer Ed DelosReyes, a Coast Guard spokesman.
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In a similar situation, a Fort Lauderdale man sent several false mayday calls over two years until he was caught, DelosReyes said. He is serving a 30-year prison sentence and was fined $250,000 to repay the costs incurred in numerous searches.
The man who made Sunday's calls could face fines and imprisonment as well if he is formally charged and found guilty of making false distress calls, DelosReyes said. The offense is a felony.
Though hoaxes aren't common, DelosReyes said they happen often enough to cause concern for Coast Guard officials. Until now, there was little they could do to find offenders except try to hone in on their radio signals.
"It's like trying to find a needle in a haystack," said Chief Emilio Rodriguez of the Isles of Capri Fire Department.
But on Sunday, rescuers had help from Harry Romano.
Romano, a Collier County inventor and owner of IMRC Technologies Inc., isn't a likely candidate to show up for a search-and-rescue operation, but Isles of Capri fire officials asked for his help because they knew about his invention that tracks marine radio calls.
Two and half years in the making, the Emergency Triangulation System is a series of towers that automatically pinpoints marine radio transmissions as soon as a radio mike is keyed.
Romano is hoping Sunday's exercise will help bring the system out of obscurity and draw financial supporters and help in placing more towers along the coast. The two that are operational now used the boat's radio signal to find the man.
"Immediately we had a bearing on the guy, and (Isles of Capri Fire Department) dispatched boats," Romano said.
The Coast Guard recently put out for bids for the development of a similar system, Romano said. But after it's developed, its first deployment will be in large urban areas, not places like Collier County. Romano didn't make the deadline for proposals even though his system is already working.
Its deployment would also help find people truly in distress who don't know their locations well enough to guide rescuers.
"Our system is so inexpensive, we can put it in coastal communities and save lives," Romano said.
Retail cost for the system is around $25,000, Romano said, but he is willing to sell it to Collier County at cost so he can point to its successful use here as a selling point to other communities to help overtaxed search-and-rescue operations.
The Fort Myers Beach Coast Guard Station has 40 personnel and covers 4,500 square miles of water and 90 miles of coastline. Phony distress calls make that job even more difficult, but the Coast Guard responds to all distress calls, no matter how vague.
That policy followed the 1997 sinking of the Morning Dew after it struck the jetty outside of Charleston Harbor in South Carolina, and sank killing all four on board. Though the Coast Guard received a faint distress call, it did not launch a search.
DelosReyes said now the Coast Guard answers all distress calls aggressively and will just as aggressively investigate pranksters.
