Coast Guard: Enforcer, regulator, rescuer
· The only military branch with a federal enforcement mission
· Personnel in Gulfport, Pascagoula and Stennis Space Center
· Patrols an area from Ocean Springs to the Pearl River
It was after midnight when the Coast Guard Station in Gulfport got a call from a woman who said her husband hadn’t returned from a fishing trip, and she was worried.
Crews from Gulfport, Pascagoula and New Orleans launched boats as well as a rescue helicopter from Mobile to search. Around 3 a.m., the helicopter crew, using night vision goggles, spotted the flickering light from a small campfire on Horn Island. The rescue was a success.
All in a day’s – or night’s – work.
The U.S. Coast Guard Station Gulfport and Coast Guard Station Pascagoula are part of an organization that has a mission unique within the nation’s military branches. While the others are prohibited from domestic law enforcement activities, the Coast Guard is right in the thick of it.
In addition to its military role, it’s part law enforcement agency, part regulatory agency. And for average people like the fisherman, it’s the cavalry coming to the rescue in time of need.
That role was highly visible when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Search and rescue operations alone saved 24,135 lives, and Coast Guardsmen evacuated 9,409 hospital patients. In total, 33,545 lives were saved, nearly equaling the number the agency saves during a calendar year.
Established in 1790 as the United States Revenue Cutter Service, the Coast Guard predates the Navy and for eight years was the fledgling nation’s only agency protecting the coast. Once part of the Treasury Department, it was placed under the Department of Transportation in 1967 and the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, where it is the largest component of DHS.
In time of war, it can be transferred to the Department of the Navy.
By law, the Coast Guard has 11 missions: ports, waterways and coastal security; drug interdiction; aids to navigation; search and rescue; living marine resources; marine safety; defense readiness; migrant interdiction; marine environmental protection; ice operations; and other law enforcement.
New digs
While the Coast Guard in 2005 was busy helping people pounded by Hurricane Katrina, its station in Gulfport was taking a beating itself. The station, commissioned at its current location in 1986, was pounded by a 30-foot wave that wiped out the building and boat facilities, leaving the crew to operate from trailers. Construction on a new building got under way in 2006, and the Coast Guard held a ribbon-cutting in May 2009 for a new building designed to withstand a Category 4 hurricane.
The 40-member U.S. Coast Guard Station Gulfport, part of New Orleans’ 8th District, patrols an area in the Gulf of Mexico about the size of Delaware – more than 1,870 square miles from Ocean Springs to the Pearl River.
The station has two 41-foot utility boats and three 25-foot response boats, and is scheduled to get a new shallow-water response boat in October. But those aren’t the only vessels. The station hosts three other commands, the 87-foot patrol boats USCG Cutter Razorbill and USCG Cutter Pompano, and the Aids to Navigation Team Gulfport.
Each cutter has about 11 members and aids to navigation team has 12.
The station missions include maritime law enforcement, like enforcement of fisheries rules and environmental laws, inspecting safety gear on board recreational and commercial vessels and enforcing laws against boating while intoxicated in both domestic and international waters. The Coast Guard is also on the front lines drug interdiction. Annually, station personnel conduct 600 plus boarding’s on recreational as well as commercial boats.
But it’s life-saving that gets attention.
The station in Gulfport averages 300 search and rescue cases annually that assist 650 people and involves some $1.9 million worth of property. Some $1.2 million in property has been saved thanks to the Gulfport station. Cases have included everything from disabled vessels to sinkings, medical emergency evacuations and midnight search and rescues – like the one that led them to Horn Island.
The station maintains a continuous radio guard on VHF-FM Channel 16 and has a manned communications room 24/7 every day of the year. On any given moment there is fully qualified boat crew ready to swing into action.
