Editorial: Amid Sea Of Confusion, Coast Guard Earns An ‘A+’

Last week we wrote, "Inaction, Paralysis Worsened Katrina’s Hit On Gulf Coast." In the ensuing days, the seas of criticism have grown more tumultuous.

Despite that tumult, however, the U.S. Coast Guard stood out like a brilliant star. The agency’s worldwide reputation for searching out lost vessels and plucking victims from disaster is well-deserved. It has done no less in its response to Katrina.

Daily on the television screen we saw the orange and white Coast Guard helicopters hovering over stranded victims. Below, Coasties who had been lowered to rooftops and other dangerous locales assisted victims into various paraphernalia designed to lift them to safety. In some cases, people were lifted in baskets to waiting aircraft, then clutched and pulled to safety. In other instances, the rescuers assisted one, sometimes two, victims at a time to cling to the lifting apparatus and rode up with them. In the event that victims refused to go, they were provided with food and water.

The Coast Guard had rescued upwards of 24,000 people from flooded areas in the last three weeks, many times what the agency normally does in an entire year.

Now that the water has receded in many of the formerly flooded areas, we’re told that such flights have either been reduced or stopped altogether. Ground searches are now in vogue.

It is highly significant that while the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was being battered by that tumultuous sea of criticism, FEMA’s director was sent back to Washington. The administration turned to the Coast Guard and put Adm. Thad Allen, chief of staff and a vice admiral with three stars, in command of the search-and-rescue and recovery operations. With Rear Adm. Bob Duncan, Eighth Coast Guard District commander, in charge of the local operations and district assets, the two veterans and the men and woman of the Coast Guard performed admirably.

The selection of Adm. Allen was a natural, because the Coast Guard is already part of the Department of Homeland Security, as is FEMA. The inclusion of the latter in the DHS is a subject of much controversy. So Adm. Allen took over response to Katrina.

The Coast Guard is, realistically, an operations-based agency. And real-life operations is what is does best. There is another side of the Coast Guard that deals with bureaucracy and more mundane responsibilities of promulgating rules, etc. But Adm. Allen has been brought up on the operations side.

One should take note that the Coast Guard also suffered losses from Katrina. Various units of the agency, scattered about the hurricane-struck area, did not get a pass. The Eighth Coast Guard District office is in the upper floors of the Hale Boggs Building, not far from the Superdome and was most likely inaccessible after the storm surge. Still others, located in various areas as they were, were either crippled to varying degrees by the storm or left intact.

Worrisome, as it relates to the towing industry, are reports that the Regional Exam Center, located in a New Orleans area strip mall, took a decisive hit, with the possibility that vital records were lost. It has been said that some functions of the REC had to be transferred elsewhere. In recent years the agency has reduced the number of RECs in the country, the center at New Orleans being the largest.

Katrina has thrown a wrench into the works. The licensing operation has been severely impacted. What is worrisome is that the agency published in its most recent Proceedings magazine a list of numbers of persons holding various mariner licenses. This list shows that only 84 hold the new steersman license! What that means is that in the entire country, there are only 84 people training to become towboat pilots. This begs the question: How can the industry expect to replace people lost to even routine attrition during the next two years with hardly anyone in the training pipeline? Two years is the average amount of time it will take to train a steersman to become a pilot. The Coast Guard lists about 30,000 operators of uninspected towing vessels, some of whom hold more than one type of operator’s license. It is clear that there need to be a lot more than 84 steersman out there or there will be a lot of boats tied up for lack of crew. The Proceedings list revealed a problem only exacerbated by Katrina.

Licensing is a Coast Guard and industry problem that will be solved at a somewhat limited pace. Katrina’s raid on the Gulf demands full attention.

Certainly there are other responders, including military, deserving of praise, but our intention is to emphasize how the Coast Guard answered the call, mustered its assets and successfully entered the fray. The result in our opinion is an "A+".

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