Advertisement

The News was contacted by Lt. Greg Fondran, of Public and Governmental Affairs at the 9th Coast Guard District in Cleveland, Ohio last week.

Fondran wanted to clarify points in the Coast Guard report about the drowned kayaker, that he worried "might lead to inaccuracies or uninformed conclusions".

"We will call. Where in the process, is the question. We need to leave it up to the people who are dealing with the case. We don't want to hamstring our people with a list of 10 things," stated Fondran.

He was referring to the report of the investigation into the June drowning death of 36 year old William Wertheimer III of Farmington. Last month the Coast Guard announced they will consider alerting local authorities as part of their plan for handing search and rescue operations in unreported and overdue situations.

It was the word ‘consider' that had Sanilac County Undersheriff Garry Biniecki worried about exactly what the coast guard will do.

"Reading through their review and action, I have one question, are they going to call us or not," Biniecki said after the report was released.

"We've met several times with district and regional (Coast Guard) commanders. I do believe there is a strong push to work together...I was promised that 911 Dispatch Center would be contacted ... But my only question is what does ‘consider alerting' mean," he added.

"The best way to explain is we will contact local authorities...Our concern is it paints us in a position that we don't want to cooperate. We know we need help," Fondran stated.

"This time we went right to the distress stage, launch and start the search now. In the next case it may be appropriate to call the sheriff first thing...We did notify (in the kayaker incident), but it was not in what people consider a timely fashion. We did send boats and helicopters. We do not control the locals, they either respond or not."

He said in most cases their first step is to call the marina when someone is reported late in arriving because often the person never left in the first place. However, in this case the kayaker was the only one who knew where he was headed, and the Coast Buard could only speculate.

Biniecki said Central Dispatch wasn't notified until almost three hours after the Coast Guard was contacted about the missing kayaker at 4 p.m. The Coast Guard left a message with the Port Sanilac Police Department at 6:32 p.m., which notified Central Dispatch at 6:55 p.m.