Coast Guard Moves to New Home
By Scott Brooks
WASHINGTON – A year and a half of structural surgery on the U.S. Coast Guard culminates Saturday as the agency officially leaves the Transportation Department and joins the ranks of the new Department of Homeland Security.
With a new boss and a redefined mission, it’s a different world for Group Woods Hole, which patrols the coastline from Plymouth to the Rhode Island-Connecticut border. For nearly 150 years, the group has balanced securing New England waters with a laundry list of other duties, from conducting search and rescue missions to stemming the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. As with other agencies, however, the Coast Guard’s priorities took a new direction on Sept. 11, 2001.
Today’s Coast Guard is a central piece of the nation’s terror-fighting network, and though its focus has shifted, the spectrum of its responsibilities has only expanded.
At home, Group Woods Hole is still doing what it has always done, but it has had to adapt to a new environment in which security is of premium importance, Lt. j.g. Michael Kahle said.
“We’ve asked a little more of our people,” Lt. Kahle said. “The Coast Guard is kind of unique. We’ve always been multi-mission. Our people are used to bending with the times.”
Along the Massachusetts coast, the Coast Guard has increased its port security patrols. Since Sept. 11, the agency has been escorting suspicious or “high interest” ships into Bay State ports, including foreign ships and others carrying dangerous cargo, as well as fuel tankers.
At Station Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard, search and rescue remains mission number one, said Mark Coady, boatswain’s mate second class. But, he said, the crews have received extra training to deal with weapons of mass destruction, and they are more aware of what could happen on their watch.
Mostly, he said, the station has found an easy balance between those safety concerns and the agency’s traditional duties.
“We do maritime security while doing regular law enforcement,” he said. “We’ve become more aware of some of the things we should be keeping our eye on, which is something we can do while doing other missions.”
Nationwide, however, the Coast Guard’s transition to its new home is considered “high risk,” as the General Accounting Office dubbed the move last month. Coast Guard units are facing a sudden surge of thousands of personnel, with about 4,000 new staffers expected to be added over the next year and a half. At the same time, the agency is in the middle of its most ambitious project ever to modernize its fleets. The $17 billion program, known as the Deepwater Project, updates the agency’s aging fleet with new cutters, helicopters and command-and-control systems.
This, along with the largest budget increase in the agency’s history this year, marks a period of great expansion for the Coast Guard, which makes a smooth transition all the more critical.
“It won’t be easy,” Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta told his service personnel at a change of watch ceremony earlier this week. “It will take some getting used to. There will be some confusion. The change will be stressful, and you will witness the growing pains up close.”
In the Northeast, the majority of the work right now is administrative, with offices working to align the varied computer and personnel systems of the agencies entering the new department, said Lt. Dean Jones, a public affairs officer for the Coast Guard’s Boston-based First District.
In the ports and waterways, however, Coast Guard crews have been refining their security mission since the day America was attacked, he said.
“We’re out here in the field,” Lt. Jones said. “People are doing their mission.”
Partnerships with local and state agencies have become more important than ever, Lt. Jones said. The Coast Guard has enhanced its relationship with Massachusetts and local police forces, he said, as well as with local fishing and boating industries. Since Sept. 11, the agency has held regular meetings with its partners in each port to ensure that both security and non-security needs are being met.
Immediately after the terror attacks, fisheries enforcement across the nation reportedly dropped by as much as 90 percent. Cutters, aircraft and Coast Guard personnel were redirected toward homeland security, with fisheries accepting a secondary place in the agency’s mission.
The Coast Guard’s rush to fulfill its new security duties was hard on the federal government’s fisheries management agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries. NOAA Fisheries spokesman Mark Oswell said the transition, along with changes to his own agency since Sept. 11, has strained enforcement efforts nationwide.
And while fisheries enforcement has improved since just after the attacks, levels have still not yet returned to normal, he said.
“When you’ve got finite resources and attach them to other obligations, it’s going to hurt,” Mr. Oswell said.
Some legislators, including Rep. Bill Delahunt, D-MA, have argued that the Coast Guard was in critical condition even before Sept. 11. Delahunt, a former Coast Guard reservist, has maintained for years that insufficient funding has left the agency to make do with outdated and ineffective equipment. The attacks, according to Delahunt spokesman Steve Schwadron, “made an urgent situation catastrophic.”
“It’s a real tribute to the Coast Guard personnel that they’ve accomplished as much as they have,” he said. “But certain things even Superman can’t do.”
With “nearly all” of the Coast Guard’s resources drawn away after Sept. 11 to handle water security, the agency was spread too thin, Mr. Schwadron said.
“Put it this way,” he said. “If the fire department needs to be trained in biochem to address problems, we still need to put out fires. We still need to rescue people from burning buildings.”
Published in The New Bedford Standard Times, in Massachusetts.
