A U.S. Coast Guard C-130 launched an aerial search Monday morning, while local fishing and scuba dive boats spent the weekend in an unsuccessful hunt for the four people in a 13-foot outboard engine boat.
Junan Nimoto, an official with the government’s disaster response office, said that despite boats scouring the ocean area around Arno Atoll — where the boat departed from Friday afternoon about 3 p.m. — starting overnight Friday and continuing through Sunday night, they turned up empty handed.
A pregnant woman reportedly coming to the capital, Majuro, to deliver her baby, and an American volunteer teacher who has been working on Arno since August are among the four people on board the small boat with a 40hp engine.
American James Debrueys of New Orleans, Louisiana has been working on Arno since August as a volunteer elementary school teacher for the Harvard University-based WorldTeach program that supplies college graduates to developing nations.
The distance from the small island in Arno to Majuro, the capital, is about 15 miles and considered a routine trip, with small boats traveling between the two atolls on a daily basis.
According to drift patterns developed by the Coast Guard and Sea Patrol, “the boat should have been close by Majuro on the weekend, but we had no sightings,” said Leander Jennet, a captain in the Sea Patrol office.
“We have been in touch with James’ family in Louisiana,” Annie Himmelsteib, director of the WorldTeach program in the Marshall Islands, said in Majuro Monday. “We are updating them every few hours.”
She said the American teachers who work at schools on Arno Atoll come to Majuro occasionally for weekend visits because the two atolls are so close.
Travel between the two atolls by small is “routine,” she said.
A Coast Guard C-130 took off from Majuro international airport at about 10 a.m. with plans to stay out all day searching for the small boat, said an official with the U.S. Embassy in Majuro. The Sea Patrol search vessel, pulled off the search Sunday for a medical evacuation on another atoll, was expected to return to help in the search late Monday, Jennet said.
