Showing posts with label makkovik. Show all posts
Showing posts with label makkovik. Show all posts

21 July 2012

Ya wanna know what stupid is? #nlpoli #cdnpoli

According to information supplied to the news media – and widely reported already – the helicopter from 444 Squadron used for a training flight than ended with a bit of fishing for the crew six weeks ago was available for search and rescue missions.

And if that re-tasking wouldn’t have been enough, the squadron had another aircraft on stand-by anyway to meet any call for civilian search and rescue service, which, by the way, is not the squadron’s primary job.

None of that stopped CBC from turning a photo of the trip into a scandal.  But to complain about that though would be to complain about dogs barking:  that’s the shit they do especially when it comes to a potential ratings driver like a controversy spun entirely out of the imaginations of people in a newsroom. 

25 May 2012

The Dunderdale-O’Brien Confusion #nlpoli

In a scrum on Wednesday, May 23, Premier Kathy Dunderdale said:

“What we are talking about, in fact, is a two hour window here.”

In the House of Assembly on Thursday, May 24, Premier Kathy Dunderdale said:

I have asked Minister MacKay for an explanation of the gap that occurred on January 30 in the search when there was a five-hour period that they were not engaged in the search. The answers are not satisfactory; the protocols need to be changed.

There is no five-hour period in the Burton Winters search that matches whatever Kathy Dunderdale is talking about in that exchange in the House of Assembly.  In fact, it’s pretty hard for anyone with even a sketchy knowledge of the events in Makkovik in late January and early February to figure out what Kathy Dunderdale is getting on with.

24 May 2012

Feds call Dunderdale’s bluff #nlpoli

In an interview with CBC’s David Cochrane, federal intergovernmental affairs minister Peter Penashue called Premier Kathy Dunderdale’s bluff about a public inquiry into the death of Burton Winters.

Penashue said:

"This is a legally initiated process and everyone would have to co-operate."

Dunderdale has criticised the federal government over Winters’ death.  That’s despite Dunderdale acknowledging – eventually – that provincial officials had responsibility for conducting the search for Winters when he went missing.  As recently as Tuesday, Dunderdale continued to try and smear Winters’ blood on federal officials.

23 May 2012

Grandmother, what big teeth you have #nlpoli #cdnpoli

Political leaders have a moral duty to the people they serve.

There are times for politicians to fight for their constituents.

And there are times when responsible political leaders must help a community to heal.  In the wake of the tragedy in Makkovik, Premier Kathy Dunderdale should be helping people to come to terms with a tragedy.  Instead, the Premier is abusing people who have put their trust in her to do the right thing.

14 May 2012

The Zen of Political Disasters: Becoming A Hole #nlpoli

As SRBP noted in an earlier post, the first step in getting yourself out of a hard political spot is to recognise that you are in a hole.

What often happens – as seen in the provincial Conservatives and the Burton Winters tragedy up to now – is that they cannot see that they are in a hole in the first place.

On Monday, the local Connies took it a step further.

05 April 2012

Time to end the despicable abuse #nlpoli

Through her shouting and bawling it is hard to know if Yvonne Jones does not know what she is talking about or does not care.

Either way, the result is the same.

On Wednesday, Jones kept up her shouting about the tragic death of Burton Winters.  She has been talking about it in the House of Assembly every day the House has held a session for the past month.  The only day Jones didn’t rise in the House was when she and two of her colleagues went to Ottawa for a media stunt with federal Liberal members of parliament and the two New Democrats from this province.

Jones asked the Premier – yet again - if she would hold an inquiry into Winters’ death.  A month ago, there might have been a reason to do so.  Jones and few other political ghouls first tried to pin the tragedy on  federal officials. While Jones and the ghouls went off in pursuit of their own political agendas,  no one asked a few simple questions to provincial officials.  After all, ground search and rescue is a provincial responsibility.

Now let us be clear. Just because people are responsible for conducting a search does not mean they must be responsible if the search ends with finding a dead body. Your humble e-scribbler has pointed to the provincial officials before, not because they screwed up, but because they had information that should have put to rest any questions, concerns or doubts about the events in Makkovik.

No one asked for and no one volunteered the information.  One media outlet had the man with answers in their lap and instead asked him about something else.

Premier Kathy Dunderdale was content, at first,  to play the same game and go off to Ottawa for answers for questions that were irrelevant to knowing what happened. She even worked the federal defence minister to cook up a protocol change about when someone made a telephone call, as if that mattered then or now. It was pure theatrics and nothing more.

Despite the political misdirections, the public did get a very good  picture of what happened over those fateful few days in late January,  They had a very good timeline on  CBC’s website very shortly after the tragedy.  On February 10, the federal government released an internal report by National Defence officials on the incident as well.  It had plenty of detailed information on the provincial government’s actions. 

On March 7, though, when the House debated a resolution on the Makkovik tragedy, someone finally gave an account of events from the provincial government perspective. To his great credit, municipal affairs minister Kevin O’Brien gave a simple and clear account of things.  Unfortunately, quite a few people - your humble e-scribbler included – never saw or heard O’Brien’s speech. 

There is no need for an inquiry. By March 7th at the very latest, anyone who earnestly wanted to understand what had happened in Makkovik in late January could have known. 

A young boy went missing.  Police and local volunteers went searching where they thought he might be.  As it turned out, they had support from a helicopter that was in the area.  The police called provincial officials who, as they always do, called on a contracted helicopter service to help.  They couldn’t fly because of weather conditions at that time but came as quickly as they could.

Provincial emergency officials tried to get another helicopter from National Defence.  An inspection turned up a problem with a fuel line which they corrected.  Other than that, they had the same weather problems the commercial helicopter pilots had.

When the weather cleared, the commercial helicopter arrived and joined the search.  The searchers turned up signs of the young boy hours later.  They asked for and got help from the joint rescue centre in Halifax.  They sent a helicopter from Goose Bay and a long range patrol plane with equipment that could find heat from a human body at great distances.

The helicopter found other signs before nightfall and weather forced them to call off the search.  The next day the commercial helicopter located the boy’s body.

There can be no question about what happened.  The events are now well known to anyone who cares to find out.  The accounts of the search are consistent and always have been.  Many people acted in good faith and in a sincere effort to find a lost boy. Through no fault of anyone, they did not find the boy before he died.

For some unfathomable reason, Yvonne Jones seems determined to smear the young boy’s blood on someone – anyone -  even though there is not a single shred of evidence to support her efforts. She is prepared to invent or imagine all sorts of faults and failings for all sorts of people. 

Premier Kathy Dunderdale is Jones’ latest victim on that account.  The Premier often has trouble getting things straight.  On this issue, she has done a great many things except cut to the simple and plain truth.  But to be fair to her, Dunderdale has not been misleading anyone or confuddled her accounts, as Jones claimed on Wednesday.

In her relentless blood-smearing efforts, Jones also tried on Wednesday to invent some delay by provincial officials in calling the federal government for help.  There was no delay and Kevin O’Brien was again right to call Jones out for her political grandstanding:

You are playing politics with a tragedy, I say to the hon. member. Appalling!

Amen to that.

Jones’ behaviour has been appalling.

But there is an even better word for it and no one should be afraid to tell it to Jones at every opportunity:  despicable.  Yvonne Jones’ behaviour is utterly despicable.  It is beyond contempt.

There are times for politicians to fight for their constituents.  And there are times when responsible political leaders must help a community to heal.  In this case, Jones should be helping people to come to terms with a tragedy.  Instead, Jones is tearing open their wounds each day.  She is abusing people who have put their trust in her to do the right thing. She is being grossly irresponsible.

And whether she simply has no idea what she is talking about or does not care, the end result is the same:  a young boy’s family, friends and neighbours and thousands of other sincere people across the province continue to suffer the most horrible mental anguish.  They should not have had to endure it for one second longer than necessary. Yet as a result of Jones’ actions, they have been deluded into looking for blame where there is none to be had. They have been misled into thinking there are some secrets  or mysteries yet to be discovered. They have suffered now for days and weeks and months longer than they needed to. There is no excuse for it.

Jones has had help in this monstrous abuse.  She received it from other politicians.  She has received it from the news media.  

And above all she has received it from her caucus colleagues and her party leader, Dwight Ball.  They have not just stood by and allowed her to carry on.  They have joined her, as Ball did for the Ottawa stunt. There are no words in the English language strong enough to condemn Jones for grandstanding over others’ grief or for Ball who has simply acquiesced to Jones at every turn.

Let Wednesday be the last day for this despicable abuse of Burton Winters’ family and the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Jones and Ball should let people begin to find some small measure of comfort from their anguish. If instead, Jones and Ball persist on their current course, then they deserve whatever political consequences they suffer.

It’s time for them to stop the despicable abuse.

- srbp -

27 March 2012

The difference in lost lives #nlpoli #cdnpoli

In the past month, at least two people have died as a result of misadventure in the wilderness on motorized vehicles.

One was was a 23 year old young man who inadvertently rode his all terrain vehicle into the water, where he drowned.

The other was a 14 year old young man whose snowmobile ran out of gas outside his hometown on the Labrador coast.  He turned the wrong way to walk home and wound up, tragically, freezing to death.  Had he turned the right way, he walked far enough to be home twice over.

In both cases, the local police directed the search with the help from volunteers and from the provincial emergency response organization.  The emergency response agency called in helicopters from a civilian contractor to give the searchers the ability to cover more ground.  That’s what they do to help the people searching on the ground.

Here’s what you will find on the Fire and Emergency Services website:

Fire and Emergency Services – NL is called upon to assist the police forces (Royal Newfoundland Constabulary & Royal Canadian Mounted Police) in search and rescue activities. This assistance is usually in the form of air services support for lost and missing persons. The program is also utilized by FES-NL during emergency response activities.

Sometimes they call for help from the military search and rescue service.  But just so everyone is clear on who is responsible for what when it comes to search and rescue, here’s the mission as described on the website for the office that co-ordinates the military rescue service:

The Joint Rescue Coordination Centre (JRCC) Halifax is responsible for the coordination of all Search and Rescue (SAR) operations associated with aircraft and marine emergencies in eastern Canada.

All this is important because CBC’s Fifth Estate decided to ignore those and a great many other factual details in its ghoulish rush to grab some ratings. They spent most of their recent report reciting aspects of the story that are well known.  The weather issue was one everyone asked about early on and that National Defence addressed in detail.

They interviewed the president of Universal Helicopters.  When his company got the call from provincial officials, they were already committed to going he says, or words to that effect.  He did not add and CBC certainly didn’t bother to explain that Universal has the contract to fly those search missions for provincial authorities. 

And if Universal doesn’t anyone trained to provide much in the way of  emergency medical support on those flights, that is because the provincial government hasn’t put it in the contract.  They don’t have any infra-red equipment either, for the same reason.  But, no need to worry, the provincial government is taking care of that.

New information about problems with the Hercules aircraft fleet in Greenwood actually explains in much clearer terms why the joint rescue centre didn’t send a helicopter from Gander.  To do so, at a time when the weather was iffy, might have risked preventing them from responding to a marine emergency.  After all that is the first responsibility for military search and rescue.  As much as fifth estate tries to spin the story otherwise,  the people who did the searching in Makkovik were the people who were supposed to be searching.

But for all that,  the Fifth Estate story was good enough to get some politicians to ask questions in the legislature.

The CBC supper hour news led into the coverage of the House of Assembly session on Monday by noting that CBC’s reporting was one of the major topics of discussion.  Their online story tells us all that the Premier is demanding answers “to questions raised about the search for Burton Winters by The Fifth Estate.”  If you think pushing turkeys at Christmas is unseemly for a news organization, imagine what you’d think of such public masturbation.

In any event, opposition politicians asked the provincial government what they would do about the federal government.  And, as CBC reported, Premier Kathy Dunderdale was happy to stand up in the House of Assembly and insist that she was as fried as everyone else that those nasty federales weren’t answering questions.  Dunderdale did her best to out-posture Liberal Yvonne Jones about whose indignation was more righteous but in the end they both wound up in a tie. 

They should both be ashamed of themselves, all the ghoul-politicians who have feasted on this tragedy, should be ashamed of themselves.  The problem is that politicians from this province seem to have had the organ that controls decent, human behaviour surgically removed.  No search and rescue crew could find it. 

Otherwise, they’d have long ago stopped torturing the Winters family or figured out they they keep looking to the wrong people to provide answers to any questions they still have.

Incidentally, Jordan Wells is the other young man who died in a tragic accident earlier this year.

No politicians seem to care about Jordan’s family, though.  No one has asked any questions in the legislature about Jordan.  No one seems to wonder why he died, how he died and why the police and local volunteers searched for him.  There’s not much chance  a national television crew will show up to record his parents’ exquisite grief so that people in Sri Lanka can watch them bathe themselves with shards of broken glass over and over and over

There is apparently a difference between tragic deaths that only certain types of politicians and reporters can see.

It might be better to be blind.

- srbp -

Related:

14 February 2012

Makkovik Fact Check #nlpoli

Simple truth:  fourteen year old boys are not supposed to freeze to death, alone,  on the ice.

Other simple truth:  in their grief and despair in such a situation, people are angry, and hurt.  They want to know why this happened and what could be done to prevent it.

Sometimes in those situations, people get hold of wrong information and go tearing off in the wrong direction full of great intentions but definitely on a fruitless quest.

In their joint news conference last week, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Forces officials released a great deal of information about the events in the search for Burton Winters. 

The RCMP were the lead agency, since ground search and rescue for a missing person is their responsibility.  The Canadian Forces officials were there because so much mistaken information had led people to chase after the federal government for failing to do their jobs.

But still, there was a great deal of useful information.  Lots of it didn’t get reported, as it seems, or people missed it.

One of the most useful pieces of information you will find is CBC’s Timeline.  It’s on the provincial CBC website and it’s been there since at least the end of last week.  Walk through and you will have no trouble understanding what happened and when it happened.

You’ll also start to understand why sections of CBC’s online story “Call back protocol for searches to be reviewed: MacKay”  contains inaccurate or misleading information.  CBC’s not alone in making mistakes in this story, their errors happen to be glaring in light of the tick-tock they have online.

Take this bit for example:

When the military was initially called the morning after Winters was reported missing, weather and then mechanical problems kept two Griffon helicopters in Goose Bay grounded. Civilian choppers joined the search.

That makes it sound like the first-line responsibility belonged to DND but they couldn’t do the job.  As a result, civilian helicopters wound up carrying the ball.

Check the CBC Tick-tock:

January 30, 2012

9:00

Fire & Emergency Services NL (FES) requests Govt Air Services. Contract helicopter (Universal) unable to fly. FES contacts JRCC Halifax but SAR unable to assist due to "flying capacity and weather." [FES] Weather conditions were "below limits" for safe operations of aircraft. At CFB Goose Bay, one Griffon helicopter out of service, and problem with oil line discovered on the 2nd one. [JRCC - Admiral Gardam]

The usual government contracted helicopter service comes from Universal, a civilian company.  In these situations, their helicopter would get the job of providing air support.  They couldn’t fly for unspecified reasons.  So, then the provincial authorities called National Defence.

Then check the tick-tock one hour later:

January 30, 2012

10:00

Woodward Aviation's helicopter arrives on scene to volunteer. [RCMP/Vardy] Poor visibility, "It was like a wall...I could not see any landmarks." [Searcher Barry Anderson in helicopter] Woodward helicopter encounters mechanical problems and returns to base. [Edmunds]

This entry puts a helicopter on the scene by 10:00 AM on Jan 30, less than 24 hours after Burton Winters went missing.  Note the reference to poor visibility, a problem that plagued the search efforts, as well as the mechanical problems on the helicopter.

Then 40 minutes later:

January 30, 2012

10:40

RCMP advised Universal Helicopter now able to assist on behalf of Govt Air Services, "precluding a further request to the Canadian Armed Forces [RCMP/Graham]

The Universal helicopter arrived in Makkovik by noon that day, according to the tick-tock.

By that evening, searchers shut down their efforts.  The next day, (January 31), an RCMP fixed-wing aircraft arrived with equipment to help in the search of a spot of open water where searchers had found tracks.

Let’s flip back to the CBC story on MacKay’s announcement on Monday:

Under the current protocol, the onus then reverts to the searchers to call the military a second time.

In the Winters case, that didn’t happen until more than 48 hours after the boy was reported missing.

True in the first sentence, misleading in the second. In this case, the search team didn’t need the DND help – by their own judgment – since they had other air assets.  They didn’t call for additional help until the RCMP airplane spotted the snowmobile in an area the searchers couldn’t reach by land later on January 31.

The tick-tock:

January 31, 2012

16:54

FES requests air support from JRCC. A CH-146 Griffon helicopter from Goose Bay joined by Aurora plane stationed in Greenwood NS search through night (both) using "forward-looking infrared equipment" with no further success. [RCMP/Graham] [FES] [JRCC/Gardam] Vardy tells CBC, Aurora was conducting patrols in the St Anthony area.

The search shut down at about 0105 the next morning.  The aircraft had seen tracks but found no signs of the boy.

According to the tick-tock, a Universal helicopter joined the search on February 1.  They continued the air search and found the body, about 10 kilometres as the crow flies, east south east of the snowmobile, and headed away from the community.

- srbp -