Search and rescue charity Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) will launch a new mission with a second ship in the Aegean Sea, where hundreds of thousands of refugees continue to cross daily from Turkey to Greece in unseaworthy boats.
The U.N. Refugee Agency, UNHCR, says an unprecedented 792,000 refugees, a majority of them being Syrians fleeing war, have braved the treacherous sea crossing this year alone. More than 3,440 have died trying, and the death toll could rise as winter approaches, the agency warned.
The 51-meter Topaz Responder, a custom-made emergency response vessel, will deploy with MOAS crew members and rescuers to Greek territorial waters the first week of December, said Christopher Catrambone, the American millionaire who founded the Malta-based humanitarian organization with his wife Regina.
Catrambone told Mashable that the Topaz Responder has an on-board hospital, 50 survivor rooms and 10 showers and bathrooms, as well as bunks for 20 families. It also has a morgue that can hold 10 bodies.
The state-of-the-art ship, built this year, is equipped with two high-speed rescue boats capable of being launched within a minute that can handle winds of up to 25 miles per hour, Catrambone said.
MOAS named the two rescue boats Aylan and Galip, in honor of the Kurdi brothers whose drownings made global headlines in September.
The announcement comes after, MOAS said last month that it was launching an operation in Southeast Asia, where Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority in the majority Buddhist Myanmar, are fleeing repression en masse on unsafe boats.
MOAS's other ship, the M.Y. Phoenix, will arrive in Bangkok on Wednesday, where it will undergo repairs and maintenance before beginning operations in the Bay of Bengal in early 2016.
Catrambone said MOAS' expansion was made possible by an "overwhelming support we have received from all over the world in the past months."
Donations began pouring in on the MOAS website as word of the charity's life-saving operations in the Central Mediterranean spread this summer.
MOAS began as a small NGO with one vessel, M.Y. Phoenix, when it launched in 2014. Since then, the charity's staff and crew, with assistance from Doctors Without Borders, has saved 11,685 people in Central Mediterranean waters. Some 1,600 were saved over the course of 11 days when Mashable embedded with MOAS in August.
"Somebody once told me it would take us years to be a global NGO," Catrambone told Mashable, adding that he doesn't plan to stop with operations in the Aegean, Central Mediterranean and Bay of Bengal. "It's only just begun."