Norwegian Rescuers Going the Distance

The cruise ship Achille Lauro catches fire off Africa. In the Arctic, a Russian airliner slams into a mountain. Off Brazil, an oil tanker rescues the crew of a sinking sailboat. Searchers find a child missing in a remote area of Norway’s mountains.

And all these crises are linked.

A small team of Norwegians coordinated these and other rescue efforts, even on the other side of the planet, through radio and satellite communications.

“We get alarms from all over the world,” said Stein Solberg, operations manager of the Joint Rescue Coordination Center Southern Norway. “We are involved with a lot of what happens on the world’s oceans.”

He calls up a world map on a computer screen and projects it onto the wall of the new facility in Sola, a town in western Norway.

There are red dots all over the map representing 2,800 contacts so far this year. The center estimates that it helps save at least 10 lives a day.

The center, founded in 1970, doesn’t have its own ships, aircraft or rescue teams. When a distress call comes in, it directs the nearest ships, often merchant vessels, to the scene.

“In many ways, we can just as easily coordinate a rescue off Africa as we can in a Norwegian fjord,” Solberg said.

The operation’s two offices -- one in Sola and one in the Arctic town of Bodeo -- are funded by the Norwegian government to coordinate land, sea and air rescue in this country of 4.6 million people that has 13,750 miles of coastline.

But with modern communications such as satellite telephones, the operation also can hear “mayday” calls from thousands of miles away.

The Norwegian operation is unique in combining air, sea and land rescue, which are handled by separate centers in other countries. Its teams come from the police, military, national health system and Norway’s main telecommunications company, Telenor.

The center’s new $5-million building in Sola has the latest in satellite communications, electronic maps and databases on the thousands of ships plying the seas and the rescue services in operation around the globe.

The technology lets rescue leaders mark the position of a ship in distress on an electronic map, then e-mail the map to ships involved in the search.

During a typical watch recently, rescue leader Nils-Ole Sunde, 46, a former sea captain, directed a rescue ship to check on a small boat found adrift and empty in a nearby fjord.

His computer screen then lighted up with a distress call from a ship in the Red Sea, 3,000 miles away in the Middle East.

Sunde checked the number on his screen and phoned the ship to find out what problem it faced. A technician testing the ship’s satellite communications had pushed the wrong button, giving the call an emergency instead of routine priority.

“You should not use the distress priority when testing equipment,” Sunde told him.

Most calls are false alarms because of such mistakes. But when the crisis is real, the rescue center can send help instantly, at any hour.

Nine years ago, the Achille Lauro, already notorious for being hijacked by Palestinian extremists in 1985, caught fire in the Indian Ocean off Africa. The center heard the distress call and directed ships to the scene, saving all but four of the 1,000 people aboard before the cruise ship sank.

Fear of terrorism may help future rescue efforts. International maritime authorities want commercial ships -- especially those with dangerous cargo -- to carry transponders to transmit their positions. They would be tracked on the rescue center’s screens with an identification number, much as airplanes are tracked by air traffic controllers.

No matter how high-tech the coordination work becomes, center spokesman Anders Bang Andersen said, it is the rescuers in the field who count most.

“Search and rescue still boils down to hard physical work and good seamanship,” he said.