by Russ Miller On a foggy morning three years ago, a 20,000-pound cargo ship collided with a flotilla of tugs and barges in the Chesapeake Bay, north of Baltimore, Md. The collision killed the captain and three deckhands of one tugboat, which sank within a minute of the crash.

Poor visibility severely hampered the Coast Guard’s rescue and salvage operations. Because that area of the Chesapeake Bay is not equipped with radar or a vessel tracking system, the Coast Guard did not know exactly where the collision occurred. It was also unable to reconstruct the incident, making it impossible to determine which vessel had strayed off course and was legally liable for damages.

Thanks to a CSC-developed system called SureTrak, we may be better able to deal with such incidents in the future.

Location, location, location

Quick access to good information is what the Coast Guard needs in emergencies like the collision in the Chesapeake. When it sends a rescue crew to a crash site, it doesn’t want to waste time trying to find the site.

Quick access to good tracking data is exactly what is provided by SureTrak, a system that was originally developed for the Coast Guard and has since been adapted for use by military ranges and commercial security applications. SureTrak integrates and displays tracking data from a wide range of sensors, including surface and air surveillance radar, shipboard radar, GPS transponders, environmental monitoring systems, thermal and daylight cameras, and closed-circuit television cameras.

The sensors in such a “maritime domain awareness system” collect data continuously. Operators can control all of the sensors remotely, and can send tracking data in real time to computer workstations at multiple facilities.

SureTrak continuously tracks every vessel within range of its sensors and digitally records all track and event data. Using this feature, SureTrak can recreate any scenario and pinpoint the exact latitude and longitude of a ship that went down. Rescuers would know where to look for survivors, salvage companies would know where to look for wreckage and cargo, and lawyers would know which ship was off course at the time of the collision. If a system like SureTrak had been installed in the Chesapeake Bay six months earlier, it might have saved thousands of dollars in salvage and recovery efforts, and the legal issues would have been more easily resolved.

SureTrak is evolving

SureTrak came about as the result of the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989. When the supertanker ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, it spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the sea. It was the biggest oil spill in American history and caused severe environmental damage.

In the wake of this accident, the Coast Guard decided to significantly upgrade its monitoring of domestic waterways. Two years later, CSC started work on the new system, which was initially fielded at Coast Guard Vessel Traffic Service Centers in Puget Sound, San Francisco, and New York.

The original development was done at a US Navy site, which allowed the Navy to see how useful the new system could be at its testing ranges. Aircraft, vessel, and weapons testing ranges are dangerous places, and one of the most important tasks of range management is keeping military ships and planes inside the ranges and private vehicles outside. CSC worked with the Navy to enhance SureTrak, making it an aerial as well as a surface tracking system. As the system matured, the Army, Air Force, and NASA saw how the system could be used at their ranges. (During a space shuttle launch, the area around Cape Canaveral becomes a NASA range.)

So far, SureTrak has been used by several Department of Defense and NASA agencies. It is likely to expand even further as it is made available to the governments of several US states, which want to improve homeland security and ensure the safety of commercial traffic in their jurisdictions. SureTrak is also being considered by defense and security agencies in Australia, Asia, and the UK.