There’s also no place capable of accommodating that many people in Barrow for four months. “We can’t put all these people in hotels,” said Sanial, “because there’s just not that many hotel rooms up there. And even if we did, there would be no place for tourists to stay.” As of April, the Coast Guard was looking into the possibility of personnel bunking at a decommissioned Distant Early Warning line facility – a Cold War-era radar station built to scan for Soviet bombers coming over the Arctic Circle. “We’re looking,” Sanial said, “at everything you can think of.”

 

Assessing Capabilities

While the summer Arctic work of the Coast Guard will be more substantial than ever before, Arctic Shield 2012 will, like its predecessors, include built-in experiments and evaluations in a region where the service is still, to an extent, feeling its way around. “It’s clear that we’ve got a lot more water off the North Slope than we’ve ever had before,” said Sanial. “And what we’re going to find out this summer will likely drive the decision-making process to determine what kind of Coast Guard presence – whether it’s permanent, semi-permanent, or seasonal – might be considered for the longer term.”

In learning more about the capability and durability of its own assets in the Arctic environment, the Coast Guard will be better able to develop an approach to meeting its requirements in a way that is proactive, layered, adaptive, and fiscally responsible. At a broader level, some of these decisions are weighed 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 – but the Coast Guard’s list is more focused on the everyday. “Launching a trailered boat in Barrow could be a challenge, based on the infrastructure,” said Sanial. “So we’ve got to go figure out what we can do. Maybe we’ll have to launch over the beach.”

At the direction of the CAWG, one of this summer’s operations will also include the first Arctic exercise of spilled oil recovery system equipment from a Coast Guard buoy tender – a joint Coast Guard, Navy, and U.S. Northern Command exercise that will offer vital experience and insight into oil spill response capabilities in the region – and that will further strengthen the service’s relationships with federal, state, local, and tribal partners.

Another 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 service 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.

Native Outreach

In a region as vast as the Arctic, the Coast Guard has always considered the knowledge and skill set of the region’s Alaska Natives to be one of the service’s greatest assets. “Our first year in Barrow, we took 25-foot rigid-hull inflatable boats up there,” said Joel Casto, District 17’s tribal liaison. “Our boatcrews simply didn’t know how to work the broken ice in that area. So we went to the Barrow Whaling Captains Association and asked if they would put a whaling captain on board our smallboats – because the person has hundreds and hundreds of years of traditional knowledge inside him, and we have none. We’ve found that the closest distance to solving a problem is asking people there what works and what doesn’t work.”

The Coast Guard has a long tradition of learning from and sharing with Alaska Native communities – but as Casto pointed out, developing this kind of relationship has taken longer in certain areas because of their remoteness. “When we first started,” he said, “we had no relationships with the folks on the North Slope – Kotzebue, Nome, and Barrow. We had to start establishing those – not only meeting with community leaders but meeting with tribal leaders, leaders of regional and village corporations, and with the nonprofits that provide services to Alaskans. So Adm. Brooks [Rear Adm. Gene Brooks, then-commander, 17th District] chose to implement a policy that we call cultural responsiveness.”

The policy of cultural responsiveness begins with what should not be a novel idea: that it’s impossible for an outsider to understand other peoples’ cultures without their input. “The only way we’re going to know is to ask and to engage,” said Casto. “So that’s what we’ve done. We’ve asked them: ‘What are your issues? What are your concerns? Here’s what the Coast Guard is thinking about. What do we need to know? What do you know about the Arctic that we need to know?’ It’s a pretty dramatic way of approaching business for a federal agency.”

The search for cultural competence led to immediate results, said Casto, from discussions over why more Alaska Natives weren’t wearing life jackets or the full-body “float coats” that can keep a person warm enough to survive until rescue. As it turned out, the local hunters didn’t like wearing them because they were bright orange and made them too conspicuous during subsistence hunting. “When I asked, ‘Well, what color should they be?’ they said white,” said Casto. “The first thing I thought was well, how would you see a white float coat if you were searching for it in the ice? But that’s not the important thing. The important thing is if you fall in the water, you live long enough to be pulled out, right? So we went back to the makers of the float coats and said: ‘Can you make them in white?’ We were able to get voluntary compliance in a culturally sensitive way, a way that worked for the indigenous peoples.”

In February 2012, the Coast Guard expanded its native outreach efforts, partnering with federal, state, and local agencies to conduct more than 50 humanitarian outreach events in 27 different communities – an effort it describes as the largest non-disaster humanitarian effort in recent history. The outreach will involve medical, dental, and veterinary services at the three hub communities of Nome, Kotzebue, and Barrow. In the smaller and more remote villages, training seminars in water safety, ice safety, boating safety, and commercial fishing vessel safety will be conducted at local schools and other community centers.

Cultural responsiveness is a philosophy that guides everything the service does in Alaska – especially its preparations for Operation Arctic Shield, which have involved discussions between Sanial; Rear Adm. Thomas P. Ostebo, the current commander of the 17th Coast Guard District; and the mayor of Barrow. “We’ve made it very important to talk with the major hub communities in Alaska,” said Sanial, “to let them know our plans for the summer in the Arctic, because it’s the right thing to do. We’re neighbors, and we’re in this together.

This article first appeared in the Coast Guard Outlook 2012 Summer Edition.