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Terms
This acronym stands for Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. The EPIRB is mounted on a boat’s deck and, when set to the “armed” position, can be triggered by water to send a distress signal back to shore via radar.
EPIRB Quotes in The Perfect Storm
The The Perfect Storm quotes below are all either spoken by EPIRB or refer to EPIRB. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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The Zero-Moment Point
Quotes
Whether the Andrea Gail rolls, pitch-poles, or gets driven down, she winds up, one way or another, in a position from which she cannot recover. […] The transition from crisis to catastrophe is fast, probably under a minute, or someone would've tripped the EPIRB. […] There’s no time to put on survival suits or grab a life vest; the boat’s moving through the most extreme motion of her life and there isn’t even time to shout.
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The Dreams of the Dead
Quotes
And then, on the afternoon of November 5th, an EPIRB washes up on Sable Island. […] Like the bottled note thrown overboard from the schooner Falcon a century ago, the odds of something as small as an EPIRB winding up in human hands are absurdly small. And the odds of Billy Tyne disarming his EPIRB—there's no reason to, it wouldn’t even save batteries—are even smaller. Bob Brown, Linda Greenlaw, Charlie Reed, no one who knows Billy can explain it.
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Get the entire The Perfect Storm LitChart as a printable PDF.
EPIRB Term Timeline in The Perfect Storm
The timeline below shows where the term EPIRB appears in The Perfect Storm. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Gloucester, Mass., 1991
...whaleback. Besides life preservers, survival suits, and life rafts, she also has something called an EPIRB on board—an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. She’s also outfitted with an ice machine, 40...
(full context)
Graveyard of the Atlantic
...by this point in the storm. Billy could also have tripped the switch on his EPIRB, but he never does—suggesting that “he’s hopeful about their chances right up until […] they...
(full context)
Into the Abyss
...as missing to the Coast Guard in Boston. Without any kind of distress call or EPIRB signal, there’s no way to know for certain that something has gone disastrously wrong. However,...
(full context)
The Dreams of the Dead
...propane tank and radio beacon near Sable Island. Finally, on November 5th, the Andrea Gail’s EPIRB washes up on Sable Island. It's switched off, which nobody can explain. Almost two weeks...
(full context)
...Charleston, South Carolina, the Terri Lei is hauling in its gear in choppy seas. An EPIRB distress signal is soon picked up by the Charleston Coast Guard. It doesn’t seem like...
(full context)
