Bay maritime traffic control goes dark: Government shutdown means operators aren’t getting paid

"They did not have enough operators to staff the overnight watch," said Scott Humphrey, executive director of the Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region, a maritime industry group that works on safety issues and collects and disseminates vessel movement data, among other things.

VTS operators are often likened to a maritime version of air traffic controllers and work at some of the country's busiest waterways.

They have gone unpaid for more than a month during a congressional budget fight that has resulted in a partial government shutdown — the same shutdown that has impacted the Transportation Security Administration and resulted in long lines and short tempers at airports across the country.

In the Bay Area, the VTS Traffic Center at the Coast Guard base on Yerba Buena Island is staffed 24/7. VTS operators are responsible for monitoring the movement of most ships and larger boats inside the Bay, communicating with bar pilots and captains via radio and helping everyone avoid collisions and groundings.

When that system goes down, as it did overnight, the Coast Guard implements its "Vessel Continuity Reporting Protocol," during which boats and ships are responsible for communicating with one another without the critical layer of safety oversight and coordination typically provided by VTS.

By all indications, the protocol worked smoothly and there were no collisions or near-misses during the outage.

Humphrey said the staffing shortage was due to employees calling out of work.

It's unclear if that was related to the ongoing government shutdown, which started when Democrats in the U.S. Senate refused to vote for a Department of Homeland Security budget bill because it includes money for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, agencies they say have spiraled out of control during President Donald Trump's mass immigration and deportation crackdown.

During that same time, Republicans have refused vote on bills that would separately fund the Coast Guard, under which VTS operates, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the TSA and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

A VTS representative referred questions about the overnight service outage to the Coast Guard, which didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.