Coast Guard response to distress call on Jewell Island, ME

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Icelander

In a 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.

So it's a Federal prison? There is already a response plan in place for a prison uprising or similar disaster then. Everybody probably just moves on that, whatever it is. If it's something else, then it's not under Federal jurisdiction anymore, or you couldn't have put a state or private facility there.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by malloyd

So it's a Federal prison? There is already a response plan in place for a prison uprising or similar disaster then. Everybody probably just moves on that, whatever it is. If it's something else, then it's not under Federal jurisdiction anymore, or you couldn't have put a state or private facility there.

It's a federal mental health facility with many of the characteristics of a maximum security prison, protected by DHS FPS contractors who are mostly the former Army and Coast guard personnel from when there was a secret research facility (with garrison) co-located with the asylum.

Unfortunately, the response plan for a prison uprising relies on an SRT team among the (still pretty large) guard force who are reservists, auxiliary Coast Guard, part-time agents or similar, commanded by an Inspector from the FPS with badge and arrest powers.

We haven't seen the Inspector yet, but we're pretty sure the SRT are the guys in vests with longarms hunting our characters to cover up the criminal conspiracy of Warden Tyrrell. Who prefers King Tyrrell and might, frankly, be several beers short of a six-pack. He's been laying in supplies for a siege amd refers to the federal agents who asked to talk to Ms. Bell, an inmate, as 'traitors come to steal that which is most precious to us, our beloved Queen.'

The orderlies are saying that little Sherilyn Bell made the guards cuckoo-clock with her mind-games, but they're clearly overreacting. Obviously, an attractive female inmate might lead to unethical and irrational behaviour among the guard force, but if anything, that would make her a victim, not an instigator of violence. Sure, she might have used social engineering and manipulation as a defence mechanism, especially as she had been placed in a desperate situation where she had no other means of protection, but blaming her for everyone going post-apocalyptic raider gang nuts is just alarmist. And victim blaming.

Anyway, long story short, whatever standard response plan to an uprising at Manhanock might have been once, the guards who ought to be calling for backup will be trying to prevent anyone else from being called in.

Come to think of it, I'd bet good money that as part of the island is still classed as a Coast Guard station, any response larger than the island guard force will include some contribution from the Coast Guard.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Icelander

It's a federal mental health facility with many of the characteristics of a maximum security prison, protected by DHS FPS contractors who are mostly the former Army and Coast guard personnel from when there was a secret research facility (with garrison) co-located with the asylum.

Unfortunately, the response plan for a prison uprising relies on an SRT team among the (still pretty large) guard force who are reservists, auxiliary Coast Guard, part-time agents or similar, commanded by an Inspector from the FPS with badge and arrest powers.

We haven't seen the Inspector yet, but we're pretty sure the SRT are the guys in vests with longarms hunting our characters to cover up the criminal conspiracy of Warden Tyrrell. Who prefers King Tyrrell and might, frankly, be several beers short of a six-pack. He's been laying in supplies for a siege amd refers to the federal agents who asked to talk to Ms. Bell, an inmate, as 'traitors come to steal that which is most precious to us, our beloved Queen.'

The orderlies are saying that little Sherilyn Bell made the guards cuckoo-clock with her mind-games, but they're clearly overreacting. Obviously, an attractive female inmate might lead to unethical and irrational behaviour among the guard force, but if anything, that would make her a victim, not an instigator of violence. Sure, she might have used social engineering and manipulation as a defence mechanism, especially as she had been placed in a desperate situation where she had no other means of protection, but blaming her for everyone going post-apocalyptic raider gang nuts is just alarmist. And victim blaming.

Anyway, long story short, whatever standard response plan to an uprising at Manhanock might have been once, the guards who ought to be calling for backup will be trying to prevent anyone else from being called in.

Come to think of it, I'd bet good money that as part of the island is still classed as a Coast Guard station, any response larger than the island guard force will include some contribution from the Coast Guard.

It might be a former shore battery station in it's backstory. That would explain why it got converted into a prison. Lighthouse posts are to picturesque and either have already been turned into museums or have someone raising money to. Just not the place to do something like that.

There is precedent for that too. Fortresses often get transformed into prisons and Alcatraz was a shore battery post too. There are a number of battery stations on the East Coast dating from the Jeffersonian defense policy.

The Coast Guard Post may have come through normal accretion and bureaucratic bargaining. Perhaps they begged off a base from the Army during Prohibition?

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

It might be a former shore battery station in it's backstory. That would explain why it got converted into a prison. Lighthouse posts are to picturesque and either have already been turned into museums or have someone raising money to. Just not the place to do something like that.

There is precedent for that too. Fortresses often get transformed into prisons and Alcatraz was a shore battery post too.

It is. Jewell Island is a real island, one where there were real bunkers, observation towers and ashore battery in WWII (after the federal government took it over from the former inhabitants).

In real life, the battery never received guns. In-setting, the black facility/ultra-max asylum received some MGs and other crew-served infantry weapons for the observation towers... and if we are really unlucky, maybe even some real heavy weapons for the concrete shore battery, to defend the base from a swiftboat raid during the Cold War or something equally unlikely.

The fictional asylum uses the floor plan for Danvers State Hospital, which we just declared was there in our alternate reality and plopped on a suitable empty space on the island, near the observation towers. In setting, it's a fictional satellite facility from St. Elizabeths, where the less ethical aspects of that federal mental institution were moved once it became bad PR to experiment on mental patients without consent within walking distance from Congress, the White House and most federal agencies. In... the 70s or so.