Posted on 12/03/2001 10:35:37 AM PST by Beach_Babe
It was 2 a.m. on Dec. 29, 1997, when the Coast Guard station in Charleston, S.C., received urgent calls on a VHF radio. But there was static and no way of knowing the location of the distress.
After daybreak, a 34-foot sailboat, Morning Dew, was found wrecked on a jetty at the entrance to Charleston's harbor. Three teen-age boys were floating in the water, dead. The body of the boat's captain, the father of two of the boys, washed up three weeks later.
A National Transportation Safety Board investigation placed part of the blame on the Coast Guard's outdated radios, which had no ability to instantly replay messages or to fix the position of callers needing help. Investigators added this unsettling note: Stations around the country could have similar problems as a result of old equipment.
The deaths have become a reference point in assessing Coast Guard capabilities now that it has been thrust into a challenging new mission: homeland security. Like many government agencies since Sept. 11, the Coast Guard is redefining its purpose in ways that will affect the lives of millions of Americans.
But many in the Coast Guard worry that from ship to shore, capabilities don't match the urgent new mission of protecting the nation's coastlines, waterways and ports from terrorist attack.
Four years after the Charleston incident, only stopgap improvements have been made at a handful of stations. A Coast Guard official described the upgrades as quote; getting us into the late 1970s or early 1980s rather than the 21st century.
The communications shortcomings are part of larger problems: The chronically underfunded Coast Guard operates aging, oceangoing ships that are embarrassing when stacked up to fleets around the world.
Of the 41 nations that have coast guards or their equivalent, the U.S. Coast Guard has the 39th-oldest fleet, some ships a half-century old. Only Mexico and the Philippines operate older vessels.
Coast Guard Commandant James Loy met recently with Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta to talk about the guard's homeland security mission and how to pay for it.
The Coast Guard is part of the Transportation Department, not the Department of Defense - which leaves it competing in Congress with roads and bridges for money.
Left-full rudder, guys
Referring to what the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have meant for the Coast Guard, Loy used this word: pivotal.
On Sept. 11, with the New York disaster still unfolding, Loy dialed Mineta to get the go-ahead to call up Coast Guard reservists and order a massive shift in operations.
Minutes after the first plane hit the tower, I said 'left-full rudder, guys. Go to port security', Loy recalled during an interview.
Instantly, the mission of the Coast Guard shifted to the home front and away from many of its principal modern duties: tracking waterborne drug caches in the Caribbean, preventing aliens from reaching U.S. shores and protecting the nation's fishing grounds.
Instead of cocaine and cod, the Coast Guard trained its focus on the security of the nation's 361 ports, St. Louis among them.
Rather than hunting for Cubans attempting passage to Florida, the Coast Guard has been keeping watch over waterfront nuclear plants and vital facilities and keeping a wary eye on arriving ships.
In Boston, a cutter blocked the entry of a tanker full of liquid natural gas because of local worries about sabotage. In Florida, another vessel escorted a cruise ship to sea after a threat was received.
In California, armed sea marshals from the Coast Guard have begun boarding ships entering harbors in San Francisco and San Diego, a program likely to spread to other harbors.
Foreign vessels now must report to the Coast Guard four days before arriving in the United States rather than one day. The added time lets the Coast Guard run checks on cargo and crew lists.
Earlier this month, the Coast Guard borrowed five high-performance and heavily-armed vessels from the Navy. The 170-foot-long, four-propeller boats, which can travel at an uncommon 50 mph on the water, are equipped with grenade launchers and even the capacity to fire missiles.
Loy remarked that the Coast Guard's new vigilance is extending far inland, even to the gambling boats moored along the Mississippi River. The 35,000-member guard has bolstered itself by calling up 2,700 reservists, including 52 from Illinois and 31 from Missouri as of early this month. The cost to the Coast Guard of the reserves alone is over $1 million a day.
Shortly, the Coast Guard may move to what is being called maritime security strike forces - teams deployed on freighters and tankers that raise suspicions by their history or origin or for other reasons. Coast Guardsmen would board these ships, keeping watch over machinery and cargo while yet another team member travels aboard pilot boats that accompany the arriving ships.
The Coast Guard's full-throttle shift to port security shows no signs of slowing, which is raising questions about duties abandoned. Since Sept. 11, the Coast Guard has moved as many as three-fourths of most of its anti-drug trafficking cutters out of the Caribbean and back to the mainland to protect ports.
The response from Asa Hutchinson, the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, illustrates the vexing nature of decisions about homeland security pending in Washington.
I understand the nature of it. We've got to go after terrorism because we lost 6,000 lives and the potential of more lives down the road. But when drugs take 50,000 lives every year, you've got to go after that as well he said.
Blaming Congress
A year ago, a rogue wave slammed into the 57-year-old Coast Guard cutter Sedge in the Bering Sea, pouring water through a vent, shorting out the electrical system and starting a fire.
No injuries were reported, but the vessel drifted helplessly for two hours in the trough of a storm.
A similar problem had occurred nearby a few weeks before with another cutter, the 58-year-old Storis, dumping nine sailors into the sea while the cutter chased a vessel that had illegally entered U.S. waters.
Neither harrowing incident would have occurred had the Coast Guard been operating the modern vessels that it has sought for years. Next spring, if all goes well, the Coast Guard intends to award a contract to begin building new cutters and phasing out the old ones.
But the pace of replacing the boats and other equipment remains uncertain, even with the Coast Guard's new homeland security duties.
Retired Adm. Ed Gilbert, who was the Coast Guard's chief budget officer among his other duties, recalled losing out perennially to highway projects, Amtrak and airports in the annual battle for Transportation Department money. He blames Congress.
When was the last time a politician didn't get re-elected because the Coast Guard didn't get adequately funded? he asked, alluding to the appeal of constituent-friendly road projects.
Another former Coast Guard official observed, Part of the problem is that we have traditionally been too nice to play the games they play in Washington. Another part is that there are elements in the Coast Guard that insist on doing things like they were done in the 1930s.
For seven of the last 10 years, the Coast Guard has been forced to return hat-in-hand to Congress seeking supplemental appropriations to its roughly $5 billion budget. This year was shaping up as the same: The administration of President George W. Bush requested funding that amounted to a 10 percent cut in days at sea by ships, Coast Guard officials told Congress.
That shortage may be remedied by a proposed $250 million add-on at the insistence of Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. But anything above $54 million, the present add-on for the Coast Guard in the budget resolution, is uncertain.
As is additional money to cover all the new duties of homeland security. Kerry and Snowe sent the White House a letter recently asking the administration to remember the Coast Guard when splitting up the $20 billion approved by Congress for the war on terrorism. But the White House hasn't said what it will do.
Meanwhile, the Coast Guard is left to redefine a future that will have a lot to do with how closely the United States intends to watch its waters and ports. As with many homeland threats, the potential for waterborne terrorism is almost limitless.
The United States has 95,000 miles of coastline. Billions of dollars of goods enter by water each year - including 11 million shipping containers, of which only 1 percent have been examined up to now.
Draconian security conflicts with what the United States has championed: global commerce and ever-freer trade. In other words, since Sept. 11, the government has tightened borders that it has worked aggressively to loosen.
Any major change in philosophy would alter both what the United States stands for and how the Coast Guard has operated for much of the time since it was established as the Revenue Cutter Service more than 200 years ago.
Loy is searching for what he calls "the new normal." Whatever level of security that entails and however much new equipment it includes, the Coast Guard will operate with a vastly heightened awareness.
We try to prevent things from happening that are bad, but if they do, we deal with the consequences, he said.
From The Wave (8/11/01)
Gateway to USCG: Get Out, Please
By Howard Schwach
If the National Park Service (NPS) has its way, Coast Guard Station, Rockaway may soon be a thing of the past, replaced by restaurants, shops, kayak and bicycle rentals and even a small inn.
The intent of the NPS to move the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) completely out of its last station on the Rockaway peninsula was made clear in a letter from Billy Garrett, the superintendent of the Jamaica Bay Unit of Gateway National Park, to Rear Admiral George Naccara, the Commander of the First Coast Guard District in Boston, Massachusetts.
In the letter, dated June 15, 2001, Garrett said, "One of the most important elements (of a multi-year development plan) is this effort to establish a multi-modal transportation hub on the Rockaway peninsula. It is our intent that this hub be centered around Coast Guard Station Rockaway as well as our adjacent maintenance facility. We are calling this combined site ‘Riis Landing.’
Accordingly, the purpose of this letter is to investigate the feasibility of the Coast Guard transferring to the National Park Service all Coast Guard controlled property at Station Rockaway that is excess of your needs."
Some Rockaway residents are not sure that they like the idea of the Coast Guard abandoning Rockaway, particularly in light of the water-related activity on the peninsula in the past three weeks.
"We have had several drownings, a large number of water rescues on our ocean beaches and a couple of rescues that the NYPD carried out, but that should have had Coast Guard involvement," says Peter Thompson, a long-time boater in the area. "This does not seem to be the right time for the Coast Guard station to become a restaurant."
In a letter to Garrett dated August 7, Jonathon Gaska, the district manager for Community Board 14, stated his objection.
"The board is supportive of the ‘Riis Landing’ project and the potential it has to provide not only ferry service, but adjacent economic development. We are, however, concerned by your efforts to remove the only presence that the Coast Guard has in Rockaway."
"It is our feeling," Gaska added, "that you can develop this area and still allow for the small presence that the Coast Guard has in our community."
Other locals, however, seem unconcerned by the proposed pullout by the Coast Guard. "I was really concerned when they pulled their copters out of Floyd Bennett Field and then pulled their boats out of Station Rockaway," says Chamber of Commerce president Liz Sulik. "That was a few years ago and I am not sure what they do around here anymore."
"The Coast Guard does not do rescues in either Jamaica Bay or in the ocean off Rockaway anymore," says Congressman Anthony Weiner. "They defer to the New York Police Department’s harbor and aviation units, and those units do an excellent job."
"What they do is mostly tows," he says. "I am not sure that their leaving will make a difference."
"I will not accept a reduction in safety," he added. Weiner says that he will "keep an open mind on the issue."
"We thought that the sky was going to fall when the Coast Guard scaled down their involvement originally," Weiner says. "The sky did not fall down and it probably will not even if NPS takes over the facility."
Garrett does not think that safety will suffer in any way.
"It is my understanding that the presence of the Coast Guard in the waters around Rockaway and your response capability in the area is fully supportable from existing facilities at Station New York (in Staten Island), Station Sandy Hook (New Jersey) and Station Jones Beach (South Shore, Nassau County)," Garrett wrote. "As a result of this capability, the shore facility at Rockaway appears to be operationally redundant and may be considered excess property relative to the Coast Guard’s current needs."
At press time, Alex Romero, a spokesperson for the National Park Service, told The Wave, "the plan is still under negotiation between the NPS and the Coast Guard."
No date has been set for the completion of the negotiation or for a possible takeover by NPS of the USCG facilities in Rockaway.
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