Erasure detection and power control are performed for an intermittently active transport channel with unknown format. A receiver processes each received block and determines whether it passes or fails CRC. For each received block with CRC failure, the receiver performs erasure detection by computing a symbol error rate (SER) and energy of the received block, comparing the computed SER against an SER threshold, comparing the computed energy against an energy threshold, and declaring an erasure if the computed SER is less than the SER threshold and the computed energy exceeds the energy threshold. The SER and energy thresholds may be adjusted based on the average SER and the average energy for prior received blocks with CRC failures. For power control, an SIR target is increased by an UP step whenever an erased block is detected for the transport channel.