Alaska's Coast Guard distress radios have missed calls, and a fix is funded

When a mariner in trouble off Alaska keys a VHF radio, there is a chance the Coast Guard does not hear it. The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general found in 2021 that outages in the state's distress radio network had at times prevented the Coast Guard from receiving and responding to calls for help.

The network is Rescue 21, the Coast Guard's system for hearing and locating mariners in distress. It was finished in the contiguous states in 2017. A Coast Guard memo that September said funding had fallen short of what Alaska required, and that the rest was deferred rather than cancelled.

The inspector general laid out the result. Coast Guard officials told investigators that in 2020 Alaska's 33 towers averaged 85 percent availability against a requirement of 98 percent, with individual sites ranging from 26 to 100 percent, and several had been out for long stretches since early 2019. The report blamed antiquated equipment the Coast Guard had to keep running longer than planned, and Alaska winters and remote sites that make repairs slow. It also found the Coast Guard announces outages mainly through notices on its website, which not every mariner reads.

Alaska is formally outside the standard the rest of the country meets. In 2015 the Coast Guard declared that waters within 20 nautical miles of the East, West and Gulf Coasts, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam meet the international benchmark for VHF distress coverage. The declaration excludes Alaska by name. The Coast Guard's own notice to mariners says Western and Northern Alaska have no VHF-FM coverage at all.

The Coast Guard has now obligated $2.65 million to Chugach Dynamic Solutions of Anchorage to extend the digital links that carry radio traffic out from hubs to remote towers, as the next phase of its Alaska network work. The contract runs through September 2027. The record does not say which towers it covers.