Coast Guard seeks contractor for Kodiak rescue aircraft life-support gear

The inflatable rafts, rescue-swimmer kits, and oxygen systems that keep a downed aircrew — or a fisherman pulled from the Bering Sea — alive long enough to be rescued all need someone to maintain them. The U.S. Coast Guard is now hiring that someone.

Air Station Kodiak has posted a solicitation for a private contractor to inspect, repair, and overhaul the Aviation Life Support Equipment aboard its fleet of five HC-130J airplanes and six MH-60T helicopters — the survival gear, rescue-swimmer equipment, and liquid oxygen systems that crews carry into the worst conditions Alaska's waters produce.

That mission is the reason the gear matters more here than almost anywhere. By the federal government's own measure, commercial fishing is among the deadliest jobs in America: NIOSH puts the industry's fatality rate at 114 deaths per 100,000 workers, more than 28 times the all-worker average, and the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands crab fleet — the "Deadliest Catch" fishery — ran a staggering 770 deaths per 100,000 in the late 1990s before Coast Guard safety checks drove it down. NIOSH credits survival equipment with much of the progress, because the gear keeps people warm and afloat until rescue arrives. Maintaining that equipment, in other words, is maintaining the margin between a rescue and a recovery.

Air Station Kodiak is the largest Coast Guard command in the Pacific Area, with an area of responsibility spanning four million square miles — the Gulf of Alaska, Bristol Bay, and the Bering Sea. The contract is a small-business set-aside with a one-year base period and four option years that could run on-site at Kodiak through 2031, funding permitting. Proposals are due to the contracting office by 5 p.m. June 29.