Missing Firefighters Update: Search To Be Called Off For Firefighters Missing Off Coast Of Florida

Authorities announced it will be calling off the search for two firefighters who disappeared during a Florida fishing trip nearly a week ago.

The firefighters who went missing were Brian McCluney, of the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department, and Justin Walker, from the Fairfax, Virginia, fire department. The pair went out on a 24-foot fishing boat off the coast of Port Canaveral and never returned.

In the wake of their disappearance, a multi-agency search effort started that had 20 agencies searching for the firefighters. The agencies involved included the U.S. Coast Guard, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the FBI, and Customs and Border Patrol. Volunteers also stepped up to help the search efforts across air, land, and sea.

Search efforts encompassed over a 100,000-square-mile area for the firefighters. However, those efforts have been to no avail and the search is coming to an end.

“I’ve made the extremely difficult decision that we will suspend the active search at sundown,” Coast Guard Sector Capt. Mark Vlaun said during a news conference Thursday. He said the search area stretched from Central Florida to New England, but it was “no longer allowing us to search with any reasonable level of degree of success.”

Initial hopes for the search that it would be quick as the firefighters were friends since college and fish around the area regularly. However, search parties weren’t able to narrow the search zone and crews started referring to it as a “race against time.”