St. John's best SAR base for offshore oil: DND

A report commissioned by the Department of National Defence almost a decade ago concluded that St. John's was the best location to station search and rescue helicopters to service the province's offshore oil industry.

The 2000 report for DND, titled The Impact of Offshore Oil Operations on East Coast Search and Rescue, questioned whether Gander was the best location for DND to base its Cormorant SAR helicopters.

"For a Cougar [offshore oil industry helicopter] incident,… if a Cormorant deploys from St. John's, then it will be the first asset on the scene," concluded the report, obtained by CBC News through an access to information request. "Deployment from Gander will result in 48 minutes of additional waiting time."

The Department of National Defence has three search and rescue Cormorants based in the central Newfoundland community of Gander, about 335 kilometres northwest of St. John's, and none in the provincial capital. Those helicopters service all of Atlantic Canada.

Suggestions to improve search and rescue capabilities in the St. John's area have renewed since March, when 17 people died when a chopper operated by Cougar Helicopters crashed as it was ferrying workers to oil platforms in the Atlantic Ocean east of St. John's.

The question of where search and rescue vehicles and staff should be stationed in the province is being considered by an inquiry into offshore helicopter safety. The retired judge leading the provincial inquiry, Robert Wells, has said he wants to further explore the best place to base search and rescue when the commission resumes hearings in 2010.

"My feeling is that the response at [the St. John's airport] should be absolutely top-class, world-class response," Wells said. "Rescue must be very very quick, as quick as is humanly possible, with the technology and the machines at our disposal."

Wells has asked DND to testify as part of those proceedings, but the commission had not received a response from the department as of Monday. The military has also declined media requests to talk about the 2000 report on offshore SAR, which it commissioned from the Centre for Operational Research and Analysis, part of Defence Research and Development Canada, a DND agency.

The military's report, written by Norm Corbett and Charles Hunter, says the quickest possible response to an oil-platform emergency isn't from Gander, but it also does not conclude that means DND's search and rescue assets should be moved to St. John's.

DND's Gander helicopters provide search and rescue services for a large area, including Atlantic Canada and parts of Quebec, and the report concludes Gander is the best site for the Cormorants to fulfill that mandate.

The report concludes:

• Coverage analysis tends to indicate that Gander is well positioned with respect to historical SAR incidents.
• Better coverage of all incidents is from Gander.
• St. John's is better for coverage of Cougar incidents.
• But incident rates for Cougar will probably be quite small — no more than two incidents every five years.

In addition, Cougar Helicopters, the company contracted to transport offshore workers to oil production platforms, is tasked to provide search and rescue services as well.

Cougar could convert one of its St. John's-based Sikorsky S92A choppers into a search and rescue vehicle, but it does not currently have a helicopter solely dedicated to SAR.

A royal commission on the 1982 Ocean Ranger marine disaster, which claimed 84 lives when an offshore oil rig was destroyed during a February storm, recommended 24 years ago that search and rescue capabilities be improved. The chair of the royal commission, former Newfoundland chief justice Alex Hickman, said last March that that recommendation was never followed.