Serendipity Sunday - NOAA: Search and Rescue

The other day I happened upon an OpenSource file from 2007 of NOAA employees.

In 2005 my husband left with a friend in his 40' Ketch to sail to Hawaii. He purchased as much safety equipment as he thought necessary before leaving. One thing he bought was an EPIRB. This is an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon used to alert search and rescue services in case of emergency. Before leaving on an offshore voyage, you register the EPIRB with NOAA, the National and Oceanic Atmosphere Administration through their Cospas-Sarsat Program. You can get a device for air and land satellite tracking also. You can see from their website that there are many instances where you would want a registered satellite beacon with you.

"The Cospas-Sarsat Program is an international organization that provides space-based relay of distress signals, or alerts, from emergency beacons that use the 406 megahertz (MHz) frequency.  Cospas-Sarsat provides the alerts to search and rescue (SAR) authorities internationally.

The governments of Canada, France, Russia and the United States (the Parties) have signed an agreement to provide for the long-term operation of the system and to support the objectives of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) concerning search and rescue."

If historical ships had these there would have been more lives saved and less ships lost.
Thank heaven my husband didn't need to activate his beacon, but I felt better knowing he had it out in the middle of the Pacific ocean, with that stormy weather they encountered.

In the link below you can download the excel file I found that lists all the employees of NOAA as of Dec 2007, with their names, job titles, salary, hire date and pay grade. It was found at Internet Archive here.

There are lists of historical shipwrecks in my article of 29 May 2014: Shipwrecks 


Relevant Links:

Excel List of 12,800 employees of NOAA (PFD - 710 pages)