Capt. Brent Willits of Harrah’s Joliet Casino said his riverboat could not leave the dock (which means her passengers couldn’t bet a single poker chip) without first receiving a seal of seaworthiness from the United States Coast Guard Marine Safety Office (MSO) in Burr Ridge.
If Lt. Earl Zuelke of the Chicago Police Department’s marine unit suspects a commercial vessel is releasing contaminated discharge into the Chicago River, he calls the Coast Guard Marine Safety Office.
When a railroad in Kansas is expecting equipment that will be delivered via cargo ship to a factory located along the Illinois River at the same time a painting crew will be closing a bridge on the route, members of the Illinois River Carriers Association solve the problem by calling the Marine Safety Office.
Those are some of the reasons the folks at the MSO figure they may save business and industry thousands of dollars plus anywhere from a few to a few thousand lives every week. Neither they nor the people whose money and lives they save will ever really know. And that’s OK.
The office’s commanding officer, Capt. Mike Brown, said the self-esteem of the 28 military, one civilian and 30 reserve employees in his command doesn’t depend on being noticed. He agrees with Cmdr. Larry Brooks, executive officer of the command, who said, “It’s our job to worry so nobody else has to.”
Brown and Brooks both say they understand when people respond to a statement like that with some skepticism, especially in peacetime, when all military budgets–even this office’s meager annual $95,000 (excluding salaries)–are being eyed hungrily by other government departments. But the folks at Burr Ridge, the largest of eight Coast Guard MSOs in the Great Lakes District, are used to the raised eyebrows.
They realize that for the vast majority of people in the Chicago area, thoughts of maritime safety don’t surface until they see news reports of boating accidents. That’s when the Coast Guard search and rescue units (located elsewhere) make a big media splash as their boats and helicopters lift bobbing people from choppy waters to safety.
MSO units, Brooks said, take the back seat when it comes to public fame.
However, Brown said going unnoticed doesn’t bother him because there is a lot more to the Coast Guard than many people realize. He said that even though it is the smallest of the armed services–with 37,000 active-duty members worldwide–it is the oldest continuous seagoing service in the United States.
Also, the service’s small size presents other advantages, Brooks said. One is that acceptance into the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., unlike that for the other service academies, doesn’t depend upon a congressional appointment (the application process is grade and test dependent, just like other colleges and universities). It was, Brooks said, his ticket to a free college education.
According to Brown, another benefit of a small service is greater opportunity for ambitious types to take on more responsibility sooner than they could in, say, the Army. More responsibility translates into faster promotions, higher salaries.
Brown explained that the Coast Guard operates under the authority of the U.S. Department of Transportation in peacetime (in wartime, the authority reverts to the U.S. Navy). Its primary responsibility is domestic maritime safety, so the majority of its installations are domestic. However, wherever a U.S.-flagged commercial vessel sails and needs inspection, the U.S. Coast Guard is there, he said.
OK, but why in landlocked Burr Ridge?
This unlikely location’s proximity to the Stevenson Expressway provides faster and easier access for Coast Guard personnel to all parts of the region the office serves: from Elgin’s Grand Victoria casino and the Rock River to commercial vessels docked at a northwestern Michigan port.
In all, the Burr Ridge office is charged with maintaining maritime safety along 180-plus miles of the Illinois River and the shores of Lake Michigan from the Illinois/Wisconsin border all the way up the western shore of Michigan. The office is also an easy commute to the 12 homes in Bolingbrook that the Coast Guard maintains for its personnel and their families.
Lt. Cmdr. Ron Hassler, in charge of the MSO’s inspection department, explained that the Coast Guard’s primary focus is commercial vessel safety for both passenger and cargo vessels. This includes port safety and security, waterway management and security and marine environmental protection.
To assure the safety of all commercial vessels that ply the waterways, Hassler said each must undergo an annual inspection for structural stability, fire safety, pollution controls, lifesaving equipment and staffing. Private passenger boats fall under the jurisdiction of local police and other maritime law enforcement units.
Inspections are usually random and include both a surprise man-overboard drill (using a dummy) and a fire drill. The Coast Guard maintains an international database, called Marine Safety Inspection System, that tracks vessel inspections worldwide. That way, he said, if a vessel is inspected in a foreign port, the inspection need not be duplicated elsewhere unless the vessel is determined to be substandard. Then the ship is re-examined at the next port to assure the problem has been corrected. The service has the power to arrest, to issue citations and fines, and to hold trials.
Hassler and his seven-person inspection team also investigate any maritime accidents that occur within their jurisdiction. They perform planned and random drug testing of ships’ crews. The Coast Guard also issues Merchant Mariner licenses to all U.S.-flagged vessels and foreign vessels with an American pilot.
Lt. Cmdr. Scott Kohanek, in charge of the MSO operations department, said he and his 15-person team respond to an average of 100 incidents of hazardous substance spills per year. He and his crew act as the on-scene coordinators, monitoring or conducting the cleanup. The Coast Guard is part of a national contingency plan to deal with oil or hazardous material spills (the Coast Guard handles the ocean and inland coastal zones, while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has responsibility for the other inland zones). He said they work so closely with both state and federal environmental protection agencies it is often hard to tell where one jurisdiction starts and the other ends.
Kohanek’s group also works with the owners and operators of shipyards, towing companies, barges and any business involved in shipping anything via the waterways, he said.
Whatever the duty, Brown feels the real nature of the U.S. Coast Guard’s work is humanitarian.
“This is a branch of the service where you can actually protect and take care of people,” he said.
It is this focus on inspection, prevention and security, Brooks said, that is most attractive to those who join the Coast Guard.
Without the MSOs, supporters say, life as we know it in the Great Lakes area might grind to a painful halt. The effects of unsafe waterways would have an impact on everyone, according to Peggy Waskiewicz, fleet manager for Material Service Corp. in Morris, which owns and operates tugboats that move barges on area waterways. It isn’t just the recreational boater or commercial shipper with stakes in maritime safety, she said.
Indeed, Zuelke notes that cooperation among city, state, federal and private concerns in pursuit of maritime safety is one area where territorial bickering doesn’t occur.
“This is one place where all of us work cooperatively to provide a higher level of service than any one of us could provide alone,” he said.
Waskiewicz, president of the Illinois River Carriers Association, agrees with Zuelke. She said that by cooperating with the Coast Guard, the Illinois Department of Transportation Maritime Division and the Army Corps of Engineers, her organization is able to keep commerce operating on Illinois waterways.
“The one thing we all have in common is our love for the river,” she said of the association’s members, including the Coast Guard.
Kohanek dispels any doubts about the impact of commerce on Illinois waterways by quoting the numbers. For starters, he notes there are about 50,000 pleasure and commercial vessels navigating the northeastern Illinois portion of the Illinois River annually. Those 50,000 boats must pass under more than 200 bridges whose openings/closings come under the jurisdiction of the Burr Ridge MSO, meaning that a misstep in bridge timing could result in an automobile commuter tieup of biblical proportions, he said.
Also, of the two types of commercial vessels–passenger and cargo–navigating the waterways, the latter handle more than 60 million tons of freight per year. Kohanek said the majority of it is domestic corn oil. All coal and salt that come to Chicago also arrive via boat. Other cargo includes imported steel and petroleum products, he said, carried aboard more than 200 foreign-flagged vessels (he calls them “salties”) that enter the northeastern Illinois waterways annually.
Hassler said the commercial passenger boats, including Chicago’s Lake Michigan tour boats and the gambling casinos at Aurora, Joliet, Elgin and in Indiana, have a capacity of 22,000 people. He said that on any given weekend they operate at near-capacity, a figure that will jump to 30,000 this fall, when two more gambling riverboats are scheduled to open in Indiana at East Chicago and Michigan City.
Hassler is particularly concerned about riverboat patrons, who typically are so focused on the game that in an emergency, they might not realize they are on a cruising vessel.
Little wonder, notes Harrah’s Capt. Brent Willits, that the Coast Guard takes its inspection and prevention charge seriously. Not only do they think about the lives of tens of thousands of riverboat patrons, but also, he said, “The Coast Guard realizes the Illinois River is a vital link between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.”
The U.S. Coast Guard celebrated its 206th birthday last month, and the MSO staff from Burr Ridge and their families joined others from the recruiting office in Niles and another MSO unit in Milwaukee for a day at Great America, Brooks said. Another advantage of a small service, he said, is that it becomes like a family, where paths cross often during a tour of duty.
