[jcrawfordor]

Search and rescue authorities very much do not want people just showing up with equipment based on what they heard on the news---if you are involved in search and rescue, disaster response, or related areas, one of the first things drilled into you is that you must never "self-activate." It puts an enormous workload on the people in charge of the incident if you expect them to keep the entire world informed about the state of the search, and an even bigger workload if people start showing up without having been asked. Organizations like the Coast Guard have a public information function to manage the press and cold contacts, and a logistics function to call upon resources. Volunteered resources are rarely useful if they have not been vetted and had operational procedures established in advance.

My experience is only in wildfire and structure fire, but everything I've heard is that the situation is much the same in SAR and I can only imagine the issues with needing to having resources prepared in advanced are only more significant at sea where integration is very complex.

[schoen]

How does this interact with the norm of commercial vessels responding to distress calls at sea?

I know distress calls aren't at all the same as search and rescue, but in some incidents both phases must occur.

[jcrawfordor]

Ships nearby responding to a distress call is a matter of expedience rather than good planning - something is better than nothing. But typically once an organization like a coast guard gets involved, they start giving orders to other responding ships, including sending ships away if they aren't needed and adding to the fray. This general concept is called incident command or the incident command system (ICS) after a set of practices that I think originated in firefighting but are now broadly taught by FEMA to all sorts of disaster responders. Basically that there needs to be someone in charge of the incident and there need to be standardized and controlled flows of information, otherwise it's very easy for the response to be ineffective and even dangerous because of poor communications, miscoordination, etc.

[schoen]

Thanks! I studied ICS as part of a neighborhood emergency response training some years ago, but I don't feel that familiar with it anymore.

So I guess the basic idea is that volunteers should provide aid as they can, but once a response coordination authority is established, the volunteers should either leave the scene or put themselves under that authority's direction? (Including potentially being directed to leave the scene.)

[brianpan]

ICS is also how we handle software outage response (aka on-call). And yes, it originated from firefighting response.

https://response.pagerduty.com/training/courses/incident_res...

[fredoralive]

There’s a bit of a difference between a ship already at sea altering it’s course to get near and assist a vessel in distress (where they might be first on he scene), vs ship going to sea especially for an event I guess? You don’t want the area too crowded with “good Samaritans” who’ve all gone to sea just to assist.

I recall some comments saying that operators of a submersible that could hypothetically rescue a sub stranded on the bottom being discouraged from deploying for the Titan by the coast guard, which perhaps means they already knew the fate of the vessel. Although it could be that they already had a suitable submersible arranged already and didn’t want more in the area causing complications with coordination etc.

[imwillofficial]

I would say its more of a function of not trying to have to rescue two submarines.

The depths at work, and the ambiguity of where the lost sub was would result in the coast guard being careful in deploying resources until more concrete info was nailed down.