Jose Maria Rodriguez |
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) They implore the same miracle. Fofana V. did not stop praying while he watched his companions die, one by one, always with the feeling that he would be next.
This 27-year-old mechanic from Ivory Coast is the only survivor of the 34 people who embarked for Fuerteventura on Friday, September 23, in a patched-up inflatable somewhere on the Sahara coast, halfway between Boujdour and El Aaiún, without knowing that they were They were heading towards the zone of influence of a tropical storm that unloaded a whole deluge in the Canary Islands in the following three days, almost as much water as that which falls on some islands in an entire year.
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Three were rescued by the Maritime Rescue boats in very rough seas. Nothing was heard of the fourth for nine days, until 3:45 p.m. on October 1, when the Bulk Japan, a Liberian-flagged bulk carrier, issued an emergency call far away, 272 kilometers south of Great Britain. Canaria: they had sighted a black, semi-sunken inflatable at coordinates 25º 19.3N 16º 26.9W with only one person alive on board, Fofana.
The sea was so bad that his sailors found themselves unable to lower a boat. The captain had come to the conclusion that the least risky thing he could do with a 228-meter-long mass as his freighter for that castaway clinging to the zodiac was to protect it from the wind, offer it leeway with his helmet until the rescue helicopter arrived. . That, and pick up some water.
What happened to the occupants of that boat? Only Fofana V. knows, but she doesn’t feel up to sharing it. Not even the Police got any details about him the day they summoned him to the police station to hear his testimony: he had only been out of the hospital for a few hours and constantly took refuge in expressions such as “I don’t remember”, “I felt very bad”, “I didn’t know to nobody”.
EFE has been able to reconstruct that story in the last seven months through the people who shared conversations with Fofana in the 21 days he spent in the Hospital Insular de Gran Canaria and in the weeks he continued in the Canary Islands until he left for France, as well as with data from the autopsies of the bodies that were recovered in the pneumatics and from the Maritime Rescue report on the rescue.
A number above the crossword puzzle
Everyone who spoke to him agreed on the same thing: he was very affected, not only because of the effects of dehydration, which soon passed, or because of the complications caused by a serious infection in his leg (a “patera foot”) , which took several weeks to heal, but due to an obvious trauma. He barely counted strokes.
Remembering those nights in the Atlantic weighed on him. Only the patient with whom he shared a room and his wife made him smile. Although neither they spoke French nor he understood Spanish, the hospital camaraderie worked between the three of them.
It is not known what went through his bed neighbor’s wife’s head when she bought him a crossword puzzle notebook. Perhaps she wanted to offer him an innocent distraction -as innocent as it is useless for those who don’t know the language-, but the fact is that she Fofana took a pen and wrote her number on it.
That day he spoke for the first time with his family in the Ivory Coast. A full week had passed since he was rescued. With a borrowed cell phone, Fofana told her brother that he almost died trying to reach the Canary Islands, that they drifted after breaking the engine and that what followed was a nightmare.
unprecedented cyclone
In the Atlantic basin, more than 2,260 tropical cyclones had been recorded to date since 1851, according to records from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). But there had never been one with a track like Hermine, which formed off the coast of Senegal and Mauritania on September 23 and soon headed for the Canary Islands.
For the first time in history, that Saturday the 24th and Sunday the 25th, all emergency plans were activated in the Canary Islands, on a level of maximum alert. On some islands, more than 300 liters of water per square meter fell in just two days, with no special wind damage. That, on land.
The Maritime Rescue weather reports for those dates include winds of force 6, even 7 (from 50 to 61 km/h) for the maritime area of Tarfaya, with strong swells or heavy seas (waves of up to four meters); Very dangerous conditions for any small boat, impossible for a pneumatic one.
Nine days
Thirty-two men and two women, including Fofana, shared that week an eight-meter-long black inflatable, with slightly less space than that offered by two Volkswagen Golfs placed one behind the other.
In this report, EFE publishes for the first time the photos taken by the sailors of the Miguel de Cervantes Salvage ship when they recovered it on the high seas.
Thus, numerous lines of glue can be seen along their floats, even raised edges that reveal multiple patches. The starboard float and the bow are partially deflated, a sign that the boat was falling apart.
“Nine days”, was the little that Fofana managed to say on October 1 to the health workers who treated him when he disembarked from the Helimer 206, the helicopter that had evacuated him to a hospital in Gran Canaria, conscious but weak, dehydrated and hypothermic. .
When the Bulk Japan found it, sunk under the water that covered the bottom of their boat, there were four bodies, all four men. One, a Senegalese, the only one identified, had an asylum request letter and 7,000 dirhams (638 euros) in his pocket. Another had tied himself to the boat with a rope in an attempt not to fall into the sea and drown. He continued afloat, but could not resist the thirst.
lifeless bodies
Why didn’t you throw the bodies into the sea? Maybe they were friends or relatives? “I simply had no strength left,” he explained to the person in charge of the Red Cross disappearance program who met with him at the hospital, whom he helped to identify some victims through photos, a few, because in reality he did not know no one on board. He had embarked alone, without friends.
That day he recounted that the engine of his pneumatic stopped in the middle of the journey to Fuerteventura, on the verge of his second day at sea, and that the boat began to fill with water. In a boat that barely protrudes one meter above the sea, it is not difficult to imagine with what anguish all those people tried to stay afloat by bailing out water, between waves of two to four meters and a constant downpour.
Fofana told the Red Cross only about 31 adult men and two women, most from Senegal, but also from Guinea and the Ivory Coast. He did not mention any minor, but the sailors of the Miguel de Cervantes ship who recovered the inflatable to transport it to Las Palmas did not forget that, among the corpses, the warm clothes, several floats and a lot of garbage, they saw two children’s shoes.
tossed by the waves
“Inflatable boat with 34 people on board has been reported sailing in an unknown situation, from Lamsid and bound for the Spanish coast.” On Saturday, September 24, the stations of the National Safety Network at Sea began to broadcast this notice in English and Spanish to all ships in the area of the Canary Islands-Tarfaya maritime corridor to ask for their help.
At five knots (9 km/h), if there were no unforeseen events, this pneumatic should have sighted the Fuerteventura coast in less than 24 hours, but its motor broke and it was left at the whim of the wind and the Canary Current, which in that area of the Atlantic they push everything that floats towards the southwest. In the next eight days, the boat would drift more than 300 kilometers.
At a time that Fofana could specify, a good part of his companions fell into the sea. They struggled to get on the inflatable again, at the risk of tipping it over, but couldn’t. The wheels they had on board as improvised life preservers were of no use, they drowned.
The damage shown in the Salvage photos suggests that it may have been the ones sitting on the starboard float.
Those who survived that accident were consumed with thirst. They had all spent a few days hiding in the desert before embarking with few provisions near Lamsid. And the water was missing. Most drank from the sea. Fofana, no: “I knew I couldn’t prove it.”
Little by little, he saw several of his companions die, whose bodies the others were throwing into the sea while they still had strength. Others jumped overboard in a state of hallucination or delirium.
It is something very frequent in the boats, corroborates EFE a pediatrician who has treated hundreds of immigrants in the docks of Gran Canaria: the salt accelerates dehydration, the sodium in the blood soars, and the body steals water from the cells to try to compensate. When that happens in the brain, the neurons die, and the person becomes delirious, convulses, and even suffers internal bleeding.
“Many times they believe that they see land nearby and they jump into the water to try to swim,” says this doctor. On the Canary Route there are even documented cases of victims who assured that they were going to buy tobacco a second before jumping out of the cayuco.
Three days without people on board
It all must have happened very quickly. Autopsies of the recovered bodies indicate that these men died between the fourth and sixth day of the journey. It is believed that they were the last to die because those that were left were too weak to push them into the sea. “I’ll be next,” Fofana thought all the time.
For three days, he was the only remaining life on board and he abandoned himself to his prayers, there was little else he could do. When he saw the hull of the Bulk Japan sailing towards him appear on the horizon, he gave thanks to Allah. He repeated it to all his interlocutors: “God saved me”.
When he was waiting for the appointment to testify before the Police, a lawyer who assisted him those weeks informed him that they would give him a return order, so he suggested asking Spain to grant him international protection for humanitarian reasons.
“I don’t care. If they return me to my country, I accept it. I will not return. I would not have embarked if I had known what could happen,” he replied. The order was given to her, but she was not executed. Fofana V. continued in some Red Cross apartments in Las Palmas until she managed to travel to France to join another brother.
There he is now an irregular, someone exposed to being deported to the Ivory Coast if he is stopped by the Gendarmerie, without the protection that the status that Spain usually grants, at the request of UNHCR, to vulnerable victims of tragedies like his.
Those who spoke with him believe that he does not meet the profile of an economic migrant. “With what he earned as a mechanic in the Ivory Coast, he gave me”, he told them. He wanted something else, he wanted to study in France, but there are no visas to Europe for people like him.
The EFE Agency has contacted Fofana V. twice in these months through people he trusts to invite him to tell his story directly. She has always rejected him. She doesn’t feel strong enough to go back to that pneumatics. She can not.
The entry Migratory drama in the Canary Islands: Fofana’s perfect storm was first published in EFE Noticias.
