The U.S. Coast Guard's Aids to Navigation Team at Astoria, Oregon, services fog signals at twenty-three lights along a stretch of coast that is foggy more days than not.
Petty Officer First Class Maria Esquibel leads the team. She is thirty-eight, a ten-year Coast Guard veteran, and has been stationed at Astoria since 2023. She was promoted to the leadership of the team in November 2025.
The team services lights from Cape Disappointment in Washington south to Cape Blanco in Oregon, a coastline of approximately four hundred kilometres. The work is divided into a fog-signal rotation, an LED-beacon rotation, and a structural-inspection rotation, each running on its own schedule.
The fog-signal rotation, which is Esquibel's most technically demanding, takes the team to every active fog signal in the district at least once every six months.
Most of the modern signals are electronic horns: solid-state units with no moving parts, fed by twelve-volt battery banks that are themselves charged by either solar panels or by tap-off from the lighthouse's main electrical service.
A few are still mechanical. The fog signal at Tillamook Rock, decommissioned as a lighthouse in 1957 but still maintained as a private aid by a heritage trust, runs a small compressor and reed horn. The Coast Guard inspects it on contract.
And the historic diaphone at Yaquina Head, restored to working order in 2009 for ceremonial use during the lighthouse's annual open weekend, is maintained by the Coast Guard on the same six-month rotation as the active signals, even though it sounds only on the third Saturday in June.
The morning of the magazine's visit, June 3, 2026, the team's day began at the Astoria station at 05:30. Esquibel briefed the day's work over coffee in the team room: two fog-signal services on the Washington side, at Cape Disappointment and at North Head, with a 30-minute drive between them.
The team for the day was Esquibel, two enlisted technicians, and a contracted civilian electrician named Wallace Ng. The vehicle was a high-roof Ford Transit, white with the Coast Guard's red and blue racing stripe, loaded with battery testers, signal-output meters, hand tools, and a small generator.
They reached Cape Disappointment Lighthouse at 07:10. The light, a fifty-three-foot conical masonry tower built in 1856, stands on a basalt headland at the entrance to the Columbia River.
The fog signal at Cape Disappointment is a Federal Signal SS-13, a solid-state horn rated for nineteen nautical miles in clear air. It runs from a battery bank in a small cinder-block cabinet at the base of the tower.
Esquibel's first task was to disconnect the horn from the duty circuit, take a sound-output reading on a meter set fifty metres downwind of the horn's mouth, and confirm that the unit was producing at least 124 decibels at the specified frequency.
It produced 126. She noted the reading on the service form.
Ng then opened the battery cabinet. The cabinet contains four 12-volt deep-cycle batteries wired in two parallel pairs. Three of the four were reading within specification. One, the second of the upper pair, was showing voltage sag under load.
Ng pulled the failing battery, set it aside for return to the depot, and installed a replacement from the van. The work took thirty-five minutes including verification of the new battery's charge state.
The team reconnected the horn to the duty circuit at 08:55. The horn was due to sound, on its automatic fog-detection logic, only if visibility dropped below two nautical miles. Visibility that morning was eight or nine miles. The horn remained silent.
The team drove north to North Head Lighthouse, twelve kilometres up the coast. North Head's light, a sixty-five-foot tower built in 1898, stands on a headland that, by NOAA records, has fog 152 days a year.
The fog signal at North Head is a similar solid-state unit, slightly newer, installed in 2018. The service routine was identical: disconnect, test, inspect batteries, reconnect.
The North Head batteries were all within specification. The horn tested at 125 decibels. The total time on site was fifty-five minutes.
By 11:30 the team was driving back to Astoria. Esquibel filled out the service reports on a clipboard balanced on her knee. Ng asked, conversationally, how many fog signals she had inspected over her ten years.
She estimated, after a moment, that the number was somewhere between 1,400 and 1,600. She said she had not kept exact count after the first few hundred.
They reached the Astoria station at 13:15. After lunch the team would prepare the van for the following day, which was scheduled for two signals on the Oregon side, at Cape Meares and at Yaquina Head.
Esquibel told the magazine, walking back to her office, that she expected to spend perhaps another four years on the team before transferring inland. After that, she said, the work would pass to a junior officer who is currently a chief in San Francisco. She named him, but asked that the magazine not print the name until his orders are official.
The fog rolled in off the Columbia bar at 16:40 that afternoon. By 17:10 the visibility at Cape Disappointment had dropped to one and a half nautical miles, and the SS-13 the team had serviced that morning began to sound, on its automatic logic, every thirty seconds. Esquibel, off duty by then and at home in her kitchen six kilometres east, did not hear it.
