A communications receiver system is presented for detecting burst errors and providing erasure information to a block decoder, thereby effectively doubling the conventional correction capability of the block decoder with only a minimal increase in complexity. In one embodiment, the receiver includes a demodulator which includes circuitry to detect error bursts in the received symbol sequence. Once detected, the locations of symbols in error are marked in the form of erasure flags. An error correction decoder is then able to correct up to twice as many errors with the additional information provided by the erasure flags.