“What is your position? How many children are on board? Hello? Hello? Sir?”. In a rescue center in northern France, an operator answers the call of a migrant in distress who, like thousands in 2021, seeks to reach the shores of England.
The conversation in English is choppy. On the boat, there are sick children and the man asks for help. “Where are they? Send me a picture. Do you agree to return to France?” , asks the operator from the French rescue center in Gris-Nez.
Located at the foot of a lighthouse, facing the open sea of the Strait of Calais, this regional surveillance and rescue operations center, Cross, finally mobilizes the rescuers from Berck-sur-Mer (north) to help the vessel.
The night comes to an end. The two operators have their eyes fixed on a series of screens to keep a close eye on the strait. As a preventive measure, one tugboat and two patrol boats were mobilized.
On the screen, each vessel appears with its time of detection, location, description and number of passengers, among other information, and also whether they have life jackets.
The information comes from calls from migrants, from other ships, from associations...
It dawns. The fog hides the cliffs of British Dover, on the other side of the strait. Telephone calls increase, sometimes coming from the same boat. We have to contrast the information.
- “Come with us” -
“What is the problem? Does the engine work? Do they need assistance?” , the questions follow each other.
When a boat is identified en route, “we make sure that people don't risk their lives,” explains Marc Bonnafous, director of the Cross. Each alert is analyzed in depth to “prioritize” “rescue operations”.
This is a “delicate” task, as clandestine vessels, fragile and overloaded, are “difficult to locate”, points out Véronique Magnin, spokesman for the region's maritime prefecture.
Migrants “know how maritime rescue works,” he explains. Sometimes, “they call us to tell us that they are in difficulty, but that they just want to be escorted to British waters”. Some do so from the beginning, hoping to secure their ten-hour journey.
Like this migrant who appears in the WhatsApp messaging of the Cross: “Please, we are at sea. We need your help. Come with us.”
If migrants don't ask for help, “we don't force them.” “We approach, we see if they have life jackets, a coherent route and if the boat floats well” and we “watch” them until the British relay, Magnin says.
- “We are not the police” -
On the ground, “internal security forces are fighting clandestine immigration. At sea, we only do rescues”, says Marc Bonnafous. “We are the SAMU of the sea, not the police”, “we have enough shipwrecks to create additional risks.”
Since the first voyages in 2016, the director highlights the “industrialization” of the phenomenon, with ships “over 12 meters [in length] with between 30 and 50 people on board”. Almost 29,000 migrants managed to reach the English shores in 2021, according to London.
For four years, “more than 50,000 migrants were rescued” in the strait, Bonnafous says. But this dangerous journey also took the lives of 38 migrants in 2021, 27 of them in the same shipwreck.
Rescuers do not forget the tragedy that occurred on November 24. The director of the Cross recalls the call of the prefect maritime: “That's it. What we feared has happened.”
That day, “there were more than 40 rescue operations on the French side. All calls were recorded and communicated to justice,” which opened an investigation into the circumstances of the tragedy, he explains.
“We have not been able to determine if the people who were shipwrecked had called us, since we don't have their numbers. But that day, all the calls received were dealt with,” he says.
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