Official left SOS for date with wife
24.02.2007
THE top Immigration Department official on Thursday Island left a junior officer to monitor a stricken vessel in the treacherous Torres Strait because he had to take his wife to dinner at the local lawn bowls club.
At 4pm on October 14, 2005, Garry Chaston began taking distress calls from the unseaworthy Immigration vessel Malu Sara, which was carrying four adults and a child on the 74km trip between Saibai Island and Badu Island. The skipper, Immigration Department officer Wildred Baira, told Mr Chaston he was ``lost in fog''.
But The Weekend Australian has learned that at 6pm, Mr Chaston handed the phone over to a junior officer, Jerry Stephen, so he could keep an appointment to take his wife to dinner at the Thursday Island Bowls Club. At 2.15am the next day, Mr Chaston was told by Water Police, who had taken over of the situation, the boat was ``sinking fast'', but the most senior Immigration officer on Thursday Island did not return to take control until 9.15am.
By then, the Malu Sara had sunk, and Immigration Department officers Captain Baira, 35, and Ted Harry, 50, along with Valorie Faub, Flora Enosa and her daughter Ethena, were most likely dead.
An investigation by The Weekend Australian has revealed that a ``rescue'' vessel was dispatched more than three hours after the last desperate call came from the doomed vessel -- that they were ``taking water and sinking fast''.
Asked yesterday about the incident, Mr Chaston, who was moved to Immigration Department offices in Cairns because Torres Strait Islanders were threatening him, said: ``I have been advised by the department not to say anything, so you will have to direct your questions to them.''
Local community leaders, however, are still angry, claiming the government agency let the party drown ``because they were black''.
The coronial inquest into the deaths of the five people will be held on Thursday Island in April.
Yesterday, Badu Island chairman Jack Ahmat said locals were upset that their people had
been sent out in a boat that was known to be leaking and had no navigation aids for a trip in some of Australia's most treacherous waters.
``The boat had nothing -- and it was made very badly,'' Mr Ahmat said. ``The motor was playing up and they were told to take the boat back here to Badu -- they had motor problems in Saibai.
``No radio call was put out to get trawlers to go to help them -- they were just allowed to sink.
``If the boat had police or Customs people in it, they would have been rescued immediately, but because they are black people, they don't worry about them.''
The Malu Sara sank at 2.15am on October 15, but a rescue boat did not reach their last-known position near Badu Island until after 7am. Neither the boat nor any person was found.
The search was abandoned after six days, and on October 25, 10 days after the Malu Sara sank, the body of Enosa was found by Indonesian fishermen on a reef 140km from Badu Island.
The Malu Sara and five sister vessels were launched on August 30, 2005 at a ceremony on Thursday Island attended by then immigration minister Amanda Vanstone.
Senator Vanstone said the boats were ``the newest addition to Australia's border security'' after the fleet was commissioned and blessed.
After the Malu Sara tragedy, the other five vessels -- all built on contract by Subsee Explorer from Cairns -- were withdrawn from the water, put in storage and tested.
All were found to be so shoddily built that the decks were not watertight and they were not even the correct length.
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau found the boats were deficient in design and did not have proper floatation to keep them afloat if they capsized; the cockpit floor was not watertight, allowing water to accumulate in the hull; the cockpit scuppers and motor-well freeing port allowed seawater to flow back into the boat; the vessel would have exhibited unstable characteristics and capsized when the cockpit was swamped.
The report also found the Malu Sara did not have a navigation chart; there was no sea anchor; the satellite telephone was not effective; there was no radio; no global positioning system, no depth-sounder, and it had only a manually operated bilge pump.
As well, the vessel was not equipped with the most effective emergency position indicating radio beacon, which cost $500, and instead had an analogue EPIRB costing $200 which was picked up only by low-orbiting satellites every 90 minutes.
Baira, the skipper, was not licensed to drive any boat and had been given no training by the Immigration Department in operating the vessel.
