Can a Young American Entrepreneur Succeed Where Europe Has Failed? - Outside Magazine
Three days after boarding the 131-foot rescue vessel MV Phoenix in Augusta, Sicily, I was standing on the ship’s top deck on a warm June dawn, watching the rotor blades of a blue-and-orange-striped Camcopter S-100 drone shudder into motion. We were a few miles southeast of the Bouri Offshore Field, a patch of deepwater oil wells and drilling platforms jointly owned by an Italian company and the Libyan government, in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea. Lit at night by natural-gas flares and heavily trafficked by naval ships, merchant vessels, and maintenance boats, the oil field has become a beacon for refugees fleeing by sea from war and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa and Syria. The Phoenix had arrived in the vicinity of Bouri the previous night, after a 30-hour sail from the east coast of Sicily. We were waiting for either a summons to action from the Maritime Rescue Coordination Center (MRCC) in Rome, run by the Italian coast guard, or for visual contact with a refugee-filled boat by one of the Phoenix ’s drones. Because those vessels are often unseaworthy, and the conditions aboard are so wretched, the MRCC encourages ships equipped for rescues to intercept the migrants as soon as they exit Libyan waters and transport them to southern Italy, the closest... Source: www.outsideonline.com
