Capsized ship officer slams Brazil
Unidentified students who were rescued from the Canadian sailing ship Concordia
The first officer of a sailing ship that capsized off Brazil's coast said he and 63 others on board could have been rescued within hours if Brazilian officials had ordered planes and other boats sooner.
Kim Smith said there was at least one other vessel within four hours of his training ship, the Concordia, just before it capsized and sunk on the afternoon of February 17.
It took nearly 40 hours before merchant ships were able to safely rescue the 48 students and 16 crew members stranded in lifeboats several hundred miles off the Brazilian coast.
Brazilian officials should have been alerted immediately by the emergency beacon aboard the Concordia and responded more quickly, Mr Smith said.
"There was a vessel within four hours of us and I know they received a distress call almost instantly," he said from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, the home base for the Concordia.
"There could be a false signal, but when you see that there are 64 people involved you'd think they would step it up a little."
The Brazilian navy has defended its response to a shipwreck that left the teenage students adrift on the ocean for two nights. The navy deployed a search aircraft about 19 hours after it received a distress signal from the SV Concordia, which officials say is in line with standard procedure.
The Brazilian navy could not immediately be reached for comment.
Navy spokeswoman Maria Padilha said last month that naval responders received a distress signal at about 10pm local time and immediately tried to make radio contact with the vessel. They also communicated with nearby ships and aircraft to see if they could spot anything wrong in the area.
The aim was to assess what type of emergency had occurred, she said, given that it could have been anything from a minor engine problem to a grave illness or a sinking ship.
