To perform erasure detection for an intermittently active transport channel with unknown format, a receiver determines an energy metric and a symbol error rate (SER) for a received block with CRC failure. The receiver computes uncorrelated random variables u and v for the received block based on the energy metric and SER, the estimated means and standard deviations of the energy metric and SER, and a correlation coefficient indicative of the correlation between the energy metric and SER. The receiver then evaluates the uncorrelated random variables u and v based on at least one decision criterion and declares the received block to be an erased block or a DTX block based on the result of the evaluation. The decision criterion may be defined based on a target probability of false alarm and adjusted based on another metric, such as a zero state bit, for the received block.