Coast Guard: Hoax calls may cost lives, money

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - A little boy's voice cries out: "Mayday! Mayday! We're going down!"

It may just have been intended as a moment of play, but on Saturday about 6:46 p.m., it caused dozens of Coast Guard personnel and other emergency responders to rush to possible areas where a boat might have been actually sinking or in distress.

The Coast Guard for Southeastern New England determined the call may have come from somewhere around Portsmouth.

Helicopters, response boats and others scrambled to the site, searched for an hour, and found nothing. But among at least five teams responding, the Coast Guard says, five hours in all were wasted -- because, they believe, it was a child playing on the radio.

It's the fourth false distress call in the region in the past month, and Coast Guard officials have had it.

"The Coast Guard is required to search for every distress call, regardless of the assumed source," said Cmdr. Jeannot Smith, chief of response operations for Sector Southeastern New England. "Calls like this one can needlessly burn out our crews and divert our attention from mariners who are actually in distress."

The Coast Guard is spreading the word to boaters who have children aboard that they need to educate them on proper radio protocol. If a false distress call is made, or if you know the identity of a suspected hoax caller, you need to report it to the authorities.

Others convicted in false distress call cases have been ordered to pay as much as $190,000 in restitution, and jailed for as much as a year and a half.