Radio Traffic Led to False Reports of Gunfire on Potomac

Washington Post ^ | Friday, September 11, 2009 | William Branigin, Debbi Wilgoren and Spencer S. Hsu

[nickcarraway]

Radio traffic about a Coast Guard training exercise Friday led to erroneous television news reports that guardsmen had fired on a recreational boat in the Potomac River, near where President Obama was remembering the 9/11 attacks, a senior Coast Guard official said.

The news reports generated "uncertainty," said Vice Adm. John Currier, the Coast Guard chief of staff, that prompted federal and D.C. officials to respond anxiously. D.C. police raced to the riverside, and the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded planes at Reagan National Airport, .

Currier told reporters outside Coast Guard headquarters in Washington that no local, state or federal agencies were notified of the training exercise because it was "routine" and "low-profile." He did not apologize for the incident, but said the Coast Guard would review its procedures to ensure that future training exercises would not spark similar alarm.

"No shots were fired," Currier said. "There was no suspect vessel. There was no criminal activity. . . . This was a routine training exercise."

He said that unspecified "members of the public" had "intercepted" clear-channel, unencrypted Coast Guard radio transmissions regarding the exercise and apparently concluded erroneously that a real interdiction of a suspect vessel was taking place on the Potomac, near Memorial Bridge. Not far from the river, President Obama attended a ceremony Friday morning at the Pentagon to mark the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Currier said that although no shots were fired during the exercise, there was "verbalization of gunfire" in the radio transmissions.

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

CNN jumped the gun after they heard the scanner and didn’t confirm the story. Idiots.

[I Drive Too Fast]

CNN = Confirming Not Needed

[Iron Munro]

Bright Idea Of The Millenium:

"Hey! Lets have a realistic training excercise the morning of 9/11 in the water right near the bridge President Obama will use to travel from the White House to the Pentagon. We can pretend we are intercepting a boatload of armed terrorists."

"Great idea! What could possibly go wrong?"
.

[Da Coyote]

CNN is a joke and is only watched by airport boarding area prisoners.

Heh, and they deign to criticize Fox.

[GAB-1955]

I am an Auxlilarist who works closely with that particular Coast Guard station regularly. What I say is NOT official USCG or USCGAux policy. However, I know the people who were involved in this. They did nothing wrong except to forget to say “THIS IS A DRILL, THIS IS A DRILL” in front of the transmission. That's a very common mistake in radio operations.

These Coast Guardsmen go out on the Potomac every day of the year, day and night, rain or snow, hot or cold. 9/11 was not a National Security event, so routine training went on.

Even the White House gets it. The Coast Guard was in the right.

[Iron Munro]

Thanks for your insight.

No one at all questions the people performing their duty out on the water every day.

My point is that someone in a high level decison making capacity should have considered the significance of September 11 and the mindset of most of the population on this day.

With most of the nation torn between the painful memories of 9/11/01, and on tenterhooks expecting a follow-up attack on every subsequent 9/11, it might be prudent to forego these types of excersizes on this date.

[VRWC For Truth]

Whoring for Democrats. Nothing to see here. Move along.

[GAB-1955]

It would be... except...

Airplane crashes
Boats overturning
Children getting lost
Drowning swimmers
Emergencies happen unexpectedly, too. Should the Coast Guard stay home?

By the way, I was taking the Metro over the 14th Street bridge this morning, and I was looking at the river and the rain and suddenly said, “(Stinky) day to go out on patrol”. Apparently I was righter than I could have imagined.