Coast Guard seeks better digital maps for spill preparedness
The U.S. Coast Guard is deploying drones across the coast of Alaska to create high-quality visualizations and better digital guides to aid first responders in the event of an oil spill.
“We’re trying to get better imagery of hard-to-reach places across the state so we can update our geographic response strategies, so we do better incident responses,” said Jereme Altendorf, an emergency management specialist at Coast Guard Sector Anchorage.
In a Strait Science presentation on Thursday, Sept. 29, Altendorf shared how maritime authorities plan for spills in logistically challenging places like Arctic and Western Alaska.
Government agencies across the nation have geographic response strategies, or GRSs, which are spill response plans tailored for specific areas, he explained. GRSs guide first responders on where to pull boom or set up a diversion area, or what sensitive environments, animal species and other conditions to be aware of in the region. Altendorf said he was recently visiting the waterways around Philadelphia and the New Jersey coast covered by USCG Sector Delaware Bay. In this region, there are about 100-150 GRSs, Altendorf said, and most of the potentially impacted areas can be accessed with ease.
“They’re very accessible, and the state and federal government, and even locals go around and help make the GRSs better and update them,” he said.
But that’s not what’s happening in Alaska. The state has more than 800 GRSs, largely drafted in 2003-2004 by experts working remotely. They based their strategies on then-current charts and maps, but most of those plans have not been tested.
“Less than 1 percent of the GRSs in the state have been validated,” Altendorf said. “Again, not because we don’t want to, but because this is really, really hard and very expensive.”
He described a recent trial at a spot in the Aleutians where the local GRS directed responders to put 59 feet of boom across this stretch of water.
“What the GRS didn’t say was that there was a 5- or 6-knot current running through there,” Altendorf said. “No amount of boom is going to stay put in that kind of current.”
Altendorf explained that there are two concurrent efforts to modernize this system. One is to transition the state’s GRSs, which currently live as PDFs, to a digital geographic information system, or GIS. (Some of the most famous examples of GISs are Google Earth and Google Maps.)
“We want to make these digital so that they’re accessible by as many people as possible,” he said.
Having a digital system would also allow the USCG to better update the GRSs with new imagery. Altendorf said drones are now being used to obtain better visualizations of the coastline to ensure that the GRSs that were created two decades ago are still relevant in 2022.
“There’s not a lot of commercially available high resolution satellite imagery out there of Alaska,” Altendorf said. “If you were to zoom in on Google Maps or Google Earth, there are certain areas that have high resolution, and we definitely try to use those where we can. But those are only updated every few years, or every 10 years. We want better imagery of the GRSs and we think drones are the way to go.”
To capture that new imagery, the program managers are sending drone-flying teams into the field. One such group was in Nome for about a week in August flying the coastline and analyzing the existing GRSs here. Altendorf said the USCG partners with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, NOAA and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.
The new drone imagery is captured and processed with commercial, off-the-shelf technology he said. Right now, the team is using Skydio vehicles. Then, that imagery is overlaid on a GRS, the changes are analyzed, and updates to the existing GRS are suggested.
Altendorf said the USCG hoped to have the new system ready by 2022, though he suspected it may not be available until early next year, and that a public version of the GIS would eventually be available.