After disembarking 70 people in the port of Lampedusa on Friday night, the tugboat Open Arms, with 195 people on board, set course for Brindisi, a new disembarkation port assigned by the Italian authorities due to adverse weather conditions, where we disembarked on Sunday.
Meanwhile, on the night from Wednesday to Thursday, our sailboat Astral rescued 2 small metal boats, with a total of 62 people on board, including several medical cases and a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy and in labor, whom we eventually disembarked in Lampedusa in the early hours.
Astral set sail again on Friday afternoon and during the night, after 3 complex rescue operations of very precarious drifting iron vessels, disembarked another 136 people in Lampedusa, including 35 women—one of them pregnant—and 4 children.
In total, the teams of Astral and Open Arms assisted and rescued 985 people in the central Mediterranean over the past two weeks.
In recent days, we have also come across small empty dinghies without being able to ascertain whether the people on board had been rescued or not. This is another indication that the situation in the central Mediterranean is becoming increasingly critical.
It is therefore essential for the Italian authorities to once again assign closer disembarkation ports, so that it is possible to reach the SAR zone as quickly as possible to protect lives and prevent even more innocent victims.
With very limited resources but a great deal of determination, we have rescued over 68,000 people so far, yet the sea continues to claim innocent lives.
Photos: Matias Chiofalo / Anna Surinyach
