Earlier this week, the Netherlands’ national coast guard agency temporarily lost service on its shoreside VHF radio systems, and for half a day it was forced to rely on phones for communications with vessel traffic.  

VHF marine radio is the international standard for ship-to-ship communications and search and rescue, and is essential to any SAR agency’s work. Early Tuesday morning, the Kustwacht’s shoreside stations lost the ability to receive any marine radio channels. This left them unable to send or receive any calls by normal marine radio channels, or to send VHF navigation messages like weather alerts. The system outage affected the entire Dutch area of responsibility for search and rescue. (The Kustwacht’s cutters and rescue boats still had uninterrupted ability to receive VHF distress calls over the radio, like any other vessels.)

“We cannot hear VHF channel 16,” Kustwacht Nederland said in a social media post on Tuesday morning.

However, the Royal Netherlands Sea Rescue Society (KNRM) retained the ability to make and receive VHF calls. Five rescue stations filled in for the Kustwacht and listened in on Channel 16 for any distress calls, which (if any had occurred) they would have relayed to a coast guard operations center by phone.

At about 1330 hours Tuesday, the agency announced that the issue was resolved. VHF message transmission for routine traffic – nav messages, weather alerts and other messaging – was also restored. 

“The failure was caused by a problem with a ‘routing protocol’. This is a component in the network that ensures that data (messages) follow the correct path,” the Kustwacht said. “We will continue to investigate the cause and to prevent this in the future.”