Victim Evacuated from Ship Off Alabama’s Dauphin Island

On Monday, 02 October 2023, personnel of the United States Coast Guard medivaced a fifty-year-old man from a 302-foot vessel then located approximately eighty-statute-miles offshore of Alabama’s Dauphin Island.

Coast Guard Sector Mobile watchstanders received a call at approximately 14:17 EDT from the captain of the vessel, who requested medical-evacuation of a crew-member experiencing possible cardiac symptoms.

Watchstanders coordinated the launches of a Coast Guard Aviation Training Center HC-144 Ocean Sentry (Airbus CN-235 derivative) airplane and a Coast Guard Air Station New Orleans MH-60 Jayhawk (Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk derivative) helicopter.

Arriving on scene, the MH-60 crew landed on the vessel, brought the imperiled man aboard the helicopter, and transferred him to waiting emergency medical services personnel at New Orleans’s University Medical Center.

The man, at last report, was in stable condition.

Created by Congress as the Revenue-Marine on 04 August 1790, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) is the oldest continuously operating naval service of the United States. The Semper Paratus (Always Ready) motto to which the Coast Guard aspires speaks to the outfit’s ethos and the nature of its humanitarian and security missions.

Stated simply, the Coast Guard protects the United States' borders and defends her sovereignty by safeguarding sea lines of communication and commerce across 95,000-miles of U.S. coastline and the entirety of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone. This critical work is carried out by 44,500 active-duty personnel, 7,000 reservists, and 8,577 full-time civilian employees.

The USCG’s fleet of roughly 250 coastal and ocean-going cutters, patrol ships, buoy tenders, tugs, and icebreakers; as well as nearly two-thousand small boats and specialized craft constitutes the world’s 12th largest naval force. The service’s aviation division comprises north of two-hundred helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft the likes of the AC-37A (Gulfstream V), HC-144A (Airbus CN-235), and Lockheed’s mighty HC-130 Hercules utility turboprop transport. To supplement the aforementioned and better support its homeland security and search & rescue operations, the Coast Guard is building an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) program around General Atomics’ MQ-9 Reaper platform.

In its humanitarian capacity, the U.S. Coast Guard saves tens-of-thousands of lives every year and provides emergency response and disaster management for all manner of man-made emergencies, meteorological exigencies, and outright natural disasters.

FMI: www.uscg.mil