Living Marine Resources

Several federal laws have assigned the Coast Guard the mission of protecting the nation’s marine resources. This mission involves enforcing laws and regulations that foster the sustainability of fish stocks within the United States’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), as well as meeting national goals for the conservation, management, and recovery of marine protected species (such as right whales, Hawaiian monk seals, and Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles) and national marine sanctuaries and monuments.

In FY 2011, the Coast Guard conducted 5,500 boardings of fishing vessels, discovered 140 significant domestic fishery violations, and detected 122 illegal incursions of foreign fishing vessels into the U.S. EEZ. Often, enforcement boardings are part of a routine patrol, or undertaken after a prompt from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Vessel Monitoring System (VMS). On Jan. 27, 2011, for example, the CGC Kittiwake boarded the fishing vessel Lady Betty based on suspicious activity observed by NOAA’s VMS. The vessel was discovered to have illegally deployed 22 miles of longline gear in the Hawaiian Islands’ longline exclusion zone.

Increasingly, boardings are part of an interagency or international effort to leverage resources within a region. In February 2011, Operation Canyon Cover combined Coast Guard and NOAA resources throughout the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, and discovered three significant fisheries violations in the Hudson Canyon Closure area, where fishing for Atlantic sea scallops is prohibited. In the wide Pacific, the Coast Guard relies on partnerships with Pacific Island nations and the so-called “Quad Partners” – France, Australia, and New Zealand – to enforce both domestic laws and international treaties. One recent example was Operation Big Eye, a joint fisheries surveillance operation covering nearly 3.5 million square miles of ocean, involving patrol boats from the Republic of Palau and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, aircraft from the Royal Australian Air Force, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Coast Guard, and surveillance officers from each of the 17 countries in the Pacific Island Forum Fisheries Agency.

 

Marine Safety

The Coast Guard is charged with ensuring the navigability of 95,000 miles of coastline, 25,000 miles of inland waterways, and more than 3,700 marine terminals; a mission that also requires it to maintain more than 50,000 short-range aids to navigation (ATONs) – signs, lights, beacons, and channel markers. During the spring of 2011, a record flood season in parts of the Mississippi Basin, 14 buoy tender crews in the Coast Guard’s 8th District rebuilt, replaced, or reset 200 fixed ATONs and 8,800 buoys on the Mississippi, Ohio, Arkansas, and Missouri rivers, as well as on numerous tributaries.

The Coast Guard also ensures that the nation’s bridges – more than 18,000 of them spanning U.S. waterways – don’t obstruct navigation. It achieves this through regulatory and permit processes that rely heavily on public input, through public notifications to mariners about the status of bridge-related activities (the service averaged 40 notices a day in 2011), and through monitoring thousands of bridge construction operations. In the past year, the Coast Guard has also spent $127 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Actfunds to alter four causeway bridges in Burlington, Iowa; Devine, Ill.; Hurricane, Ala.; and Galveston, Texas.

During the cold months, the Coast Guard ensures the navigability of waterways – and sometimes helps prevent flooding – through ice breaking operations. During the 2010-2011 winter shipping season on the Great Lakes, the service’s domestic ice breaking fleet assisted more than 1,700 commercial vessel transits carrying $300 million worth of cargo. In New England, Coast Guard icebreakers facilitated the delivery of about $1.5 billion in heating oil. In the North Atlantic shipping lanes, the International Ice Patrol (IIP), a joint effort of the Coast Guard and the Canadian Ice Service, monitors iceberg danger near the Grand Banks of Newfoundland from February to August. In 2011, the IIP program provided iceberg warnings for more than 4,500 commercial transits.

The Coast Guard is custodian and operator of the U.S. government’s polar icebreakers: the Healy, Polar Star, and Polar Sea. Because the 34-year-old Polar Sea is inactive in a Seattle dry dock and its sister ship, Polar Star, on inactive reserve status, it is largely with the Healy that the service exercises and protects the nation’s sovereign rights and responsibilities in 722,000 square miles of Arctic territorial sea and EEZ. In FY 2011, the Healy, in partnership with the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S St-Laurent, gathered data in the high Arctic on the extent of the North American continental shelf. Because the Polar Star was unavailable, the Coast Guard was unable, in FY 2011, to meet requests to facilitate both the resupply of McMurdo Station in Antarctica and a scientific deployment to the Arctic. The Coast Guard hopes to reactivate the Polar Star by 2013 after an extensive retrofit that will extend its service life another seven to 10 years.

The predicament faced by the Coast Guard in the Arctic – a growing set of responsibilities, met with a declining portfolio of assets – is emblematic of the service-wide challenges faced by the Coast Guard in an era that, most likely, will see shrinking federal budgets into at least the near future. While the $1.4 billion requested in the FY 2012 budget for recapitalization is more than a president has ever requested for the Coast Guard’s recapitalization programs, it remains unclear whether the service will remain capable of performing certain missions – such as protecting lives, property, and natural resources in the Arctic – into the future. The next few years will be critical in determining the Coast Guard’s long-term capabilities.

This article was first published in Defense: Review Edition 2011/2012.