PORTLAND — For the last three years, the U.S. Coast Guard has gotten a series of calls from a voice they don’t want to hear.
It’s almost always the same, says Lt. Nick Barrow, who until recently supervised the Coast Guard’s regional search and command center in Portland. A male voice says “Mayday, Mayday” over and over again, never responding to the dispatchers’ calls for more information. The calls usually come in the afternoon during the middle of the week, and come more often in the summer.
“We can attribute at least 13 cases or calls to him dating back approximately three years,” said Barrow, who now works with the investigative unit of the Coast Guard’s district office in Boston.
The calls seem to be coming from the Lincolnville area in Waldo County.
Distress calls that mobilize personnel for a rescue that’s not needed is nothing new. Some boaters call the Coast Guard when they encounter trouble, then forget to cancel the distress calls when they find their own way to safety or are rescued by others. Some can easily be identified as “kids playing with the radio,” said Barrow. Others are one-off calls where no sign of boat or wreckage are found, probable hoaxes that can’t be investigated.
But rarely does the Coast Guard get so many repeat calls. Each call has the potential to mobilize rescue personnel, both boats and helicopter, some from as far away as Cape Cod.
So far, the “Mayday” caller has cost about $200,000, a figure that cuts deep at a time when the Coast Guard has had to absorb budget cuts of 25 percent. And even if Coast Guard personnel suspect the call is a hoax, they usually can’t discredit it completely.
“We only have to be wrong once, and that’s the challenge,” said Barrow.
Such calls put people’s lives in danger, he said. A search and rescue operation always carries some risk, and when Coast Guard personnel are searching for phantom distress calls, they aren’t available to help others who might really be in trouble. Just as dire, such calls create mistrust and doubt among rescue dispatchers.
“Those sorts of situations tend to desensitize the process,” Barrow said. “It’s the ‘cry wolf’ syndrome.”
The Coast Guard is trying to use a combination of technology and crowdsourcing to catch this chronic hoaxer. When the call has been picked up by one or more antennas, the caller’s position can be narrowed down using triangulation. From this, its been determined the calls most likely originate from the Lincolnville area. The Coast Guard also decided to go public with its investigation of the persistent hoax calls, which it doesn’t always do. The hope is that someone in the Lincolnville area might be able to identify the hoaxer.
“It’s not a very big area and there were some leads that were generated from that,” Barrow said.
The investigation is ongoing, but until the caller is found, the Coast Guard will continue to respond to “Mayday” calls.