False Distress Calls On Great Lakes Have Tripled This Year

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False Distress Calls On Great Lakes Have Tripled This Year

WOSU 89.7 NPR News | By Nick Houser

Published July 3, 2017 at 8:29 AM EDT

The Coast Guard says the cost of launching a response boat is about $4,500, while a helicopter search can cost $16,000 an hour -- costs that could be added to restitution paid by someone convicted of making a false distress call.

The Coast Guard says the number of false distress calls it's receiving from the Great Lakes has tripled this year.

The number of emergency calls that turned out not to be emergencies has jumped from 55 last year to more than 160 this year.

Lt. Christopher Yaw with the station in Cleveland says the Coast Guard treats all calls as emergencies, and the false ones usually take two forms. Either they鈥檙e an intentional hoax or prank, or they鈥檙e a report of something which turns out to be less serious than a caller realized.

鈥淭hey thought they saw a flare: it鈥檚 the Fourth of July coming up here. Flares don鈥檛 really look like fireworks, but we could see where they might be mistaken for that.鈥�

Yaw says there鈥檚 no pattern to the increase in false distress calls this year, since they鈥檙e not concentrated on one type of emergency or in one area.

The penalties for intentionally making a fake call can involve jail time and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Anyone making a distress call in error is advised to contact a local Coast Guard unit.