Petty Officer 1st Class Adrien Lively explains advanced technology used to validate vessel statuses from data collected immediately following Hurricane Sally, in Ono Island, Alabama, October 3, 2020. This data helps the Coast Guard identify if vessels are a pollution threat and to prioritize the removal of oil or hazardous substances from vessels, minimizing the environmental threat of pollution. U.S. Coast Guard video by Chief Petty Officer Melissa Leake and Petty Officer 2nd Class Nate Cox.

Transcript

We’re currently on Ono Island, which is around Orange Beach, Alabama. And basically, what we’re doing is, a couple weeks ago, an over flood occurred that established targets. Anything that looks like a vessel that was either sunk in the water way or washed up on a personal residence. Or in an environmentally sensitive area. And basically what we’re doing is, we’re putting eyes on all these targets and we are utilizing a application developed by NOAA, to capture information such as owner, how much fuel is on board, what the intentions are with the vessels, and if we need to continue any sort of coast guard action towards the vessel whether it be placing containment boom, logging it for future removal, removing fuel off the vessel. This new system we’re using is a lot more real time in the field. You basically have a phone in your hand and you can click navigate to a certain point and once you get to that certain point, you observe, you input into the system, and that information reflects within about 15 minutes to our command post that is 100 miles away. So, once we identify target based on a GPS tag, we can determine if that’s the actual location. Say for example, if the target shifted a couple hundred feet or it’s been taken out with a tide or what not. We are able to use that to determine the true location. When we arrive on scene of the target, we want to determine if it’s actively discharging, first of all. So, we check the surrounding area for pollution, we look for sheens, slicks, any sort of product that might be in the water, that would be, what we classify as recoverable. Determine if that source is actually coming from the targeting question. And then from there, we make our federal on-team coordinators make a determination whether we need to place some sort of containment or some sort of padding to collect and minimize the damage to the environment. You see a boat that is actively discharging or something that you see as a concern to a wildlife environment, we encourage you to call the National Response Center 1800-424-8802 and somebody will come out and take a look at it.