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Old 02-13-2017, 08:57 AM   #1
Icelander
 
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Default Coast Guard response to distress call on Jewell Island, ME

Project Jade Serenity is a supers/technothriller campaign set in the modern day, near midnight on Friday the 3rd of February 2017, our PCs are on Jewell Island in Casco Bay, Maine. In our campaign, there is a fictional mental institution there, the Manhanock Asylum for the Criminally Insane, and it turns out that the guards are even crazier than the inmates.

Special Agent Danny O'Toole (PC), who is a federal law enforcement officer, was able to send out a distress call on the Coast Guard emergency frequency. He was cut off before receiving an answer, but he managed to get all the relevant information out, including the fact that officers were down and that his supervisory special agent was presumed to be kidnapped by the guards.*

Jewell Island is no more than 8 miles from Portland, which is a city, although only a fair-sized one at best. It would probably take far too long for any response by law enforcement in Portland to be relevant, especially as the island is federally owned and falls under the joint jurisdiction of the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Homeland Security.** Any municipal or state police officer handed a transcript of the distress call will probably respond by waking up senior officers, seeking guidance from political figures and/or handing the whole mess back to a federal agency anyway.

What I'm wondering is what the Coast Guard might do. I know that they have a station in South Portland, which extremely close to the island (less than six miles), but I can't find online how many men are assigned to that station. It may or may not be the home port of USCGC Marcus Hanna, a Keeper-class coastal buoy tender with a crew of 25, but I have no idea how to estimate whether the cutter is in port or if it may be located many hours sail away on a duty cruise.

I'd think that O'Toole's distress call warrants sending a cutter by to take a look and trying to raise him on the radio again. He was able to recite his badge number and any necessary code words that CBP agents might be given if they have to call for help over a radio. I don't know how long it will take to respond in some way, however.

I don't know what, if anything, the Coast Guard could do if they were unable to reach O'Toole again, because radio traffic in the building we are trapped in is being suppressed by a short-ranged jammer of some sort, which is powerful enough to reduce handheld radios to static noise.

I'd also like to get some idea of what the closest Coast Guard cutter can do and how it is equipped. Would the Marcus Hanna respond or might they respond in some other way, perhaps with a cutter stationed somewhat further away, but with a law enforcement function?

Would whoever responded be able to tell that radio communications on the island are being jammed? Could they see from where? Could they do something about the jamming?

How would they react to being fired upon from the observation towers by .50 BMG and 40mm grenades from an MK 19? Do they have anything to shoot back with or are they limited to short-ranged smallarms for a boarding party?

How long would it take to get an armed cutter that could provide covering fire and land a tactical team or at least a pretty heavily armed boarding party on the island?

What needs to happen for them to be able to call in helicopters and how long would that take? How long to get helicopters that are armed or at least could deliver sniper fire that would suppress heavy weapons fire from the observation towers long enough for the helicopters to land armed people with arrest powers?

*Who might actually count as being in a state of mutiny, as several of them are USAR, Coast Guard Reserve or Maine Army National Guard, and they are actually under contract to the Federal Protective Service. As the fictional compound on the island includes a defunct Coast Guard forward base that is still officially classed as a mothballed facility under their administration, with a dock that receives regular visits from a Coast Guard cutter, it may even be that some of the guards who are former Coast Guards serve some days on active duty on the minimal administrative and maintainance tasks related to keeping the dock facilities usable.
**Because of the Coast Guard base there and also because the site used to be a black facility for unethical DoD experiments and while the outcry within government circles when this came to (limited) light wasn't enough to expose it to the public, it sufficed to quietly strongarm the DoD into closing down the experiments and allowing the bureaucrats who had made some discoveries to remove the sites from DoD control.
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Last edited by Icelander; 02-20-2017 at 06:32 AM.
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