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And all the work that Parks Canada did up front with the preliminary documentation, assisting us through the permitting process, and helping us to get on site.
When people think of Parks Canada often they think about the national parks, the natural wonders of Canada.
between human occupation of the territory and the national park that we protect.
And that link cannot be broken. It’s very important.
The story here that we had heard of one remain that was yet to be found was that of an American plane from World War 2.
And there was at the time about, at the time, 15 witnesses of the tragedy of the loss of the aircraft
It was attempting a takeoff. It was an amphibious aircraft, so it was attempting a takeoff from the water.
They attempted take-off twice and on the second attempt the hull was breached and water entered into the cabin
Me, I remember fairly well. I was next to my grandfather. On that day when the plane was taking off it was very windy.
The wind was coming from the northwest so it was fairly strong.
And he said, the waves are strong offshore. And he hadn’t finished saying the words when it started to bounce up and down.
The day that the plane left to fly, to lift off out of Longue-Pointe, it did five dives before it stalled.
It affected us. Although we didn’t know them well, we cried. They were very good people.
So, we didn’t expect to find too many remains. We thought we’d have a debris field scattered on the seafloor.
But when we actually saw the sonar images we understood immediately that we had an intact plane on the bottom.
Wow, this opens up a whole lot of potential discoveries inside the plane.
Parks Canada identified that there was an aircraft on the ocean floor at about 120 ft.
So once Parks Canada made the identification that it was a U.S. aircraft
the environment, the conditions, what was their sedimentation inside.
All those factors and all that data was to prepare as best as we could the operations to come.
was to basically try to give our American friends as much information as possible to plan the future steps.
So JPAC then mobilized a team in conjunction with Fleet Forces Command,
which mobilized the MUDSU Divers, and also the ship, the USNS Grapple.
So some contents will go back to Hawaii and they’ll be processed through the central identification laboratory, which is a part of JPAC.
That’s the scientific part. Whereas, all of the remains will be identified and they’ll be dispersed to their family members.
to return those that were lost back to their families.
You know, when we get the support and stewardship of a host nation it really helps us to have a successful mission.
Those are all key pieces to having a successful project.
Our role is to do what we can do to help them in their mission.
And the primary objective of that mission is to, if there are human remains found,
to repatriate them in order to give them the honors they deserve and help the families finally put these soldiers to rest.