The service also deployed several surface assets to the Arctic throughout the operation, to increase FOL Barrow’s offshore capabilities and conduct Arctic domain awareness patrols, establish search and rescue (SAR) and law enforcement coverage, and to enforce safety zones around two Royal Dutch Shell oil drilling rigs and supporting vessels at two sites in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas. These assets included the CGC Bertholf, a 418-foot national security cutter (NSC); a 378-foot high endurance cutter; a 282-foot medium endurance cutter; and two light ice-capable 225-foot seagoing buoy tenders. Bertholf carried its own AVDET, an Air Station (AirSta) Los Angeles crew flying an HH-65 Dolphin helicopter off its flight deck, as well as a stern-launching ramp capable of deploying and retrieving cutterboats.
Rear Adm. Thomas Ostebo, commander, 17th Coast Guard District, leads a discussion about the service’s presence in the Arctic at the Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow, Alaska, Aug. 5, 2012. The meeting, also attended by Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Bob Papp, Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., and a sampling of North Slope community leaders, focused on the service’s mitigation of the threat that increased maritime traffic in the Beaufort and Chuckchi seas presents to traditional subsistence living. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Grant DeVuyst
The choice of Barrow, said Ostebo, was an obvious one; its central location on the North Slope coast offers access to both the Chukchi and Beaufort seas’ drill sites, and at 4,200 people, it’s by far the largest community in the region, with the most developed infrastructure. “Barrow is the political, economic, and transportation center for the North Slope,” he said.
Despite its advantages, establishing a seasonal base of operations in Barrow posed several challenges. Because there’s no deep-draft port, the smaller cutters resupplied and the medium endurance cutter refueled in Nome, while the larger high endurance cutter and Bertholf traveled to the Aleutian Island port of Dutch Harbor – a nearly 1,300 nautical-mile voyage taking more than five days. Because there is no existing Coast Guard facility in Barrow, Ostebo said, the district spruced up a decommissioned Distant Early Warning line facility – a Cold War-era radar station built to scan for Soviet bombers coming over the Arctic Circle – for personnel to bunk and be fed. Additional service members stayed in hotel rooms near the downtown airport.
The first official day of SAR operations in the Arctic was July 16. The Jayhawks flew a combined 289 hours, conducting ice reconnaissance and maritime domain awareness flights as well as SAR operations. Altogether, the Coast Guard’s Arctic Shield assets completed 11 SAR cases, with four lives saved and six assisted. “I was talking to a native community recently up in Anchorage,” said Ostebo, “and they said it was the first year in their memory that they hadn’t lost somebody offshore – a whaler, or a recreational boater or fisherman. For folks on the North Slope to not lose anybody in their traditional hunting and fishing activities offshore, that’s a big deal, and it means a lot to them.”
In support of Arctic Shield operations, HC-130 Hercules aircraft from AirSta Kodiak, 820 nautical miles to the south, flew 70 logistics sorties, delivering a million pounds of cargo and fuel and conducting Arctic domain awareness and ice reconnaissance flights.
The 17th District completed Arctic Shield 2012 on Oct. 31, as the fast ice began to close in again on the coast of the North Slope.
Capabilities Assessment
The third leg of Arctic Shield 2012 was a series of assessments aimed at ensuring the Coast Guard has capable – and durable – resources in the Arctic. At a broader level, much of this decision-making is led by the Arctic Capabilities Assessment Working Group (CAWG), a joint effort by the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to develop a list of near-term recommendations for investment in the region.
At the direction of the CAWG, a key assessment of Arctic Shield 2012 was a first-ever joint training exercise involving the Coast Guard, U.S. Northern Command, the Navy Supervisor of Salvage and Diving, and other partners to perform the deployment of different types of oil skimmers in Arctic waters: a Spilled Oil Recovery System (SORS) deployed from the CGC Sycamore, a 225-foot buoy tender; a Navy fast-sweep boom; and a pocket skimmer specifically designed for ice-covered waters. “We learned a lot from that,” Ostebo said, “about how effective our SORS gear would be in ice, and how effective it would be in open water.”
An important evaluation under way in the Arctic is the Coast Guard’s Port Access Route Study, an effort to develop safeguards in advance of a surge in Arctic shipping. The study will assess whether the creation of a Bering Sea vessel routing system, with aids to navigation, is advisable to increase the predictability of vessel movements through the Bering Strait and thereby decrease the likelihood of collisions, oil spills, and other mishaps. The Coast Guard requested public input before initiating the study, and then initiated the 24-month study after the comment period ended on Sept. 6, 2011. The results will be discussed with the Russian Federation before being proposed to the International Maritime Organization.
Several Arctic Shield capabilities assessments were focused on the everyday operations of the Coast Guard. In mid-August, experts from the service’s research and development center and its Office of Boat Forces joined personnel from District 17 in a series of evaluative exercises for a pair of amphibious craft capable of navigating the unpredictable and rapidly changing water/ice/land environment of the Arctic. The Bertholf’s entire voyage, in waters where the new NSCs have never before operated, was an extended capability assessment, with its on-board AVDET helping to gauge the service’s ability to conduct offshore domain awareness patrols in the region.
This schematic outlines the force lay down for Arctic Shield 2012. The graphic demonstrates the key challenge of moving Coast Guard resources from long-established bases in southern Alaska to the emerging frontier of northern Alaska. DHS graphic
The Coast Guard is still compiling its report on the lessons learned from Arctic Shield 2012, but Ostebo said the service’s first sustained operational season in the Arctic revealed several logistical challenges. “Trying to get everything – from fuel to personnel to groceries – up in the Arctic to support our workforce, that was extremely difficult,” he said. “And another thing we learned this year was that communications are difficult, hampered by extremely limited bandwidth and extremely high cost. There’s no fiber-optic line leading to Barrow, so everything goes through satellites … If you look at major events like Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon – how would you manage one of those and bring about some kind of communication resilience up there in the Arctic? We’re looking really hard at that as one of our most immediate needs.”
The surge in Arctic activity, especially ecotourism, has Ostebo concerned about the most likely major event: “My biggest concern is a mass rescue, a mass casualty situation in the Arctic. If something like the Costa Concordia case that happened in Italy [a January cruise ship wreck in the Mediterranean that killed 32 people] played out with one of these ecotourism boats up there, with 500 people aboard, how would we get out there and rescue that many people? Where would we bring them for triage? How would we get them to advanced life support and care outside the North Slope, because they don’t have that capacity there? How quickly would we overrun the local community health centers? Those kind of things I think we really have a requirement to exercise in 2013.”
Chief among all the lessons learned from Arctic Shield 2012, Ostebo said – the most important message to be taken from the Coast Guard’s achievements during the 2012 Arctic maritime season – is that the service can, and should, be a consistent presence in the region. “I think we’ve validated the fact that the federal government needs a presence in the Arctic, and that the Coast Guard is the right instrument for the nation, because of our broad mission set and our capabilities,” he said. “A Coast Guard presence in the Arctic is important now – and it will become more important in the future.”
This article first appeared in Coast Guard Outlook: 2013 Edition.