Proposals 2006-2007

• Remote Sensing Shoreline
• Liferaft Performance During Evacuation, Rescue & Recovery
• East Coast Forecast System
• Personal Emergency Location Device
• Investigating Leeway & Drift in Ovateck Life Rafts
• CCGA-P Marine Simulator Program
• SAR Exercise Program for Major Marine & Aviation Disasters
• Man Overboard Recovery Equipment on a T-1200
• Marine Marker for Common SAR Objects

Remote Sensing Shoreline for Northern Labrador

Canadian charts have a serious lack of up-to-date coastal information on the Labrador Coast, especially from Nain, north to the Button Islands. Many rocks and islands are not identified and many others are not properly positioned; major features such as fiords do not have good shorelines. This situation is hazardous to mariners and those who are called to assist in an emergency. The Canadian Hydrographic Service (CHS) is responsible for charting Canadian waters, but priorities dictate that this area will receive little attention in the foreseeable future. This proposal will allow CHS to provide information to improve SAR capability and reduce the risk to mariners and the environment.

A shoreline database consisting of provisional paper charts will be created using Remote Sensing technology in the Northern Labrador area. These products will be available for use in Search and Rescue activities. Mariners will be able to use the products to enhance navigational safety and therefore prevent incidents necessitating SAR. These provisional paper charts will allow accurate positioning using GPS, radar or pilotage techniques. Advances in Satellite Remote Sensing technology allow the collection of shoreline data in remote areas that traditionally were inaccessible.

With the Voisey's Bay project underway, commercial and recreational traffic will increase in Northern Labrador. The mountainous regions and deep fiords along this coast attract cruise lines interested in tourism. The shoreline on Canadian charts in these areas was collected in the 1800s and represent a danger to Search and Rescue operations using modern Global Positioning Systems with the existing portfolio of paper charts. Most areas are either not surveyed or not surveyed to modern standards. Information on the current state of charts for SAR in Labrador is included in the publications: Requirement for Coast Guard Services Along the Labrador Coast, May 1998; the Transportation Safety Board of Canada's Report M95N0053, Striking and Sinking of the Tug Sea Alert near Nain, Labrador, 1995; and the Labrador Seaway Initiative Proposal, Safety and Development.

This proposal addresses immediate concerns and is not dependent on a long-term systematic and expensive solutions involving the survey of corridors for shipping to produce new nautical charts. The success of this project would also support a similar approach for Arctic waters that have the same inherent problems as the Labrador Coast.

The linear distance along the coastline from the Button Islands to the area where accurate charting begins, just north of Nain, is 268 nautical miles. The fiords greatly increase the coastline to be covered. The mountains and ice in the Northern Labrador area provide unique challenges for remote sensing systems collecting shoreline. Data from remote sensing platforms including IKONOS (high resolution satellite imagery) and RadarSat ("Synthetic Aperture Radar" earth observation satellite) will be purchased to create high resolution precise shoreline. Preliminary investigation indicates that RadarSat I can be used in most areas and this will contain the overall cost of the project.

The data will be owned by the National SAR Secretariat and will be made available to CHS for the production of products and provision of services.

Liferaft Performance During Evacuation, Rescue & Recovery

Liferafts are commonly used worldwide as primary or secondary means of evacuation from merchant ships, passenger vessels, fishing boats, and offshore petroleum installations. In many cases, liferafts are required by regulation or law whose explicit aim is to provide for the safety of life at sea.

Despite being almost universally prescribed for and carried by ships and offshore platforms, the actual performance that can realistically be expected of liferafts and the people who have to use them in practice is largely unknown. The absence of quantitative knowledge about liferaft performance - especially in different weather conditions - weakens rational decision-making processes governing a host of associated search and rescue operations and planning.

The proposed project will address this need by assessing liferaft operational performance in terms of technical capabilities in a range of weather conditions. The influence of external factors and mitigating measures on performance will also be evaluated. This includes the role of human factors and training.  The outcome of the project will be practical knowledge that can promote survival and support operational decision-making, with the ultimate goal being to improve the safety of personnel who work on or travel by sea.

East Coast Forecast System

This proposal seeks funding from the NIF program to assist to develop a forecasting system for East Coast/part of the Eastern Arctic surface currents model and transfer the data to CCG for ingestion into CANSARP.  

In search and rescue operations, the search area is determined from the best available information at the time of incident.  At the present, we have 3 East Coast models that overlap in some areas and have gaps in other areas.  Search coordinators must make decisions on what model data to use and be aware of model gaps to ensure the best information is used in the search plan.  During a search operation, it is not the time to evaluate and decide which model to use.  The combined East Coast Forecast model will remove the overlaps and gaps and also extend the surface current model to cover an area in the Eastern Arctic around Baffin Bay where we do not have any surface data to assist us.  Real-time data from surface drifters can provide the most critical information required for CANSARP.  But drifter data have limited spatial and temporal coverage: drifters such as SLDMB’s are deployed by aircraft or ships tasked to a SAR operations and in the search area for the operation.  To initially predict a search area for the operation, the controller must rely on models of surface currents to determine where to send units to search.  Once in the search area, the use of SLDMB’s will increase the accuracy of where the units should search.  This is best strategy for predicting surface currents over a large area is to use real-time data (SLDMB’s) in conjunction with model predictions.  

Over the past ten years, scientists at IML, BIO and Dalhousie University have developed ocean circulation models for the Grand Banks, Scotian Shelf and Gulf of St. Lawrence.  Built on the past experience, a large-domain forecast model covering the entire eastern Canadian seaboard with advanced features and more reliable results will be developed in this project.  The model will be calibrated and validated against data from surface drifters deployed by the Canadian Coast Guard and the Canadian Coast Guard College. A forecasting system based on the architecture of an existing system that combines the operations of data transfer, model execution, graphic display and data delivery will be developed. 

This proposal will integrate three East Coast models with an extension to cover areas not included in the existing models.  The computer generated surface currents will be transferred to CCG and ingested into CANSARP for operational use.  The work described in the proposal is closely linked to DFO/Science’s efforts in operational oceanography with the aim to provide information to operational agencies and contribute to the departmental mandate of safe and accessible waterways.  A recently formed DFO working group on regional ocean modeling strongly endorses a seamless solution for short and medium time scale forecasting on Canadian shelf waters.  Two PERD projects have provided funding for research directly related to the objectives of this proposal - investigation of wave effects on surface currents and construction of a numerical grid for a large-domain ocean model. 

Personal Emergency Location Device

The objective of this project is to develop an inexpensive, compact and lightweight personal emergency distress beacon for search and rescue purposes. Canadian Coast Guard search and rescue officials have identified the need for this device in the commercial and recreational inshore fishery. There are a variety of personal emergency beacons available off-the-shelf that are designed for marine search and rescue, including various configurations of EPIRBs (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon). However, the devices that have the required functionality have a per-unit cost of $1000 or higher and consequently are priced too high for widespread use as a personal distress system. The devices that are in the range of several hundred dollars are suitably priced, however, they generally do not have the required functionality for the inshore fishery.

In addition to the price barrier, the devices currently on the market are generally the size of a normal VHF radio system or larger and are more suited to fit in a pocket rather than work directly on clothing. Personnel involved in both the insure fishery and coast guard search and rescue have indicated that wearable tag-like emergency locator device is more desirable and could be more widely accepted by the fishing industry because its use would not hinder normal activities on a small boat or vessel. Such a device would also be useful in a variety of other marine sectors, such as in the offshore fishery, marine transportation sector, offshore oil production and exploration industry, and inshore/freshwater recreational boating sector.

Investigating Leeway and Drift in Ovatek Life Rafts

This submission seeks NIF funding support to carry out a leeway investigation of a relatively new type of SAR object (specifically, the Ovatek 4- and 7-person rigid life rafts: http://www.ovatek.com/  for which leeway speed and angle information is currently not available in the National Search and Rescue Manual (DFO, 1998) and the Canadian Search and Rescue Planning (CANSARP) program.  Ovatek life rafts; which have SOLAS, CCG, and USCG approval; are becoming a popular alternative to inflatable life rafts on board fishing vessels in Atlantic Canada and the West Coast of North America.

Since 1995, Ovatek has sold more than six hundred 4-person units and 7-person units.   In spring 2003, a SAR operation (Incident L2003-0034 Quebec Region) was conducted for a 7-person Ovatek life raft in the Quebec Region of the Gulf of St. Lawrence without benefit of leeway information for use in CANSARP.  The liferaft belonged to the MV Caboteur” that sank on April 4, 2003 at 1215 EST.  Fortunately, in this case a vessel, the MV Marie-Eve 2” was standing close by when the MV Caboteur” sank and the 6-man crew of the MV Caboteur” was recovered from the life raft within an hour with no injuries or deaths.  The life raft along with an EPIRB from the MV Caboteur” was not recovered until 2 days later on April 6, 2003.

The incident report prepared by the Operations Centre of the Marine Rescue Sub Centre Quebec states in its report that the position of the search objects was very different than the positions calculated by CANSARP.  Further it states that upon examination of the incident it is evident that the fibreglass survival capsule (Ovatek Life Raft) did not have the same rhythm of drift as a conventional life raft.  If it had not been for the close proximity of the MV Marie-Eve 2” the outcome of this sinking may have been quite different.

The proposed project seeks to address the concerns raised by this incident by conducting field experiments to establish a relationship between the observed wind velocity and the measured Ovatek life raft leeway velocity for inclusion in CANSARP.  The proposed approach will follow the general methodology successfully used in previous work by the proponents (e.g., Fitzgerald et al., 1994).

A two-phase project is proposed for FY 2004/2005 and 2005/2006.  In the first year, a field experiment will be conducted in coastal waters off eastern or northeastern Newfoundland using instrumented Ovatek 4- and 7-person life rafts.  For each SAR object, two configurations will be used: fully loaded and equipped with a drogue and lightly loaded without a drogue.  These configurations will provide minimum and maximum leeway speeds, respectively, for the given SAR object.  The free drifting objects will be fitted with an anemometer system to record relative wind velocity, a fluxgate compass, Global Position System (GPS), air and sea surface temperature probes and an InterOcean S4 current meter to measure leeway directly.  A directional wave buoy moored in the area of the experiment will provide wave data.   This array of instrumentation will provide all the data necessary to evaluate the relationship between wind velocity and SAR object leeway.  It is expected that leeway data will be obtained for wind speeds up to 25 to 30 knots during Phase I.

Following the 28-day field program, an analysis of the data will be conducted and an interim report issued.  Phase I work will serve as a trial and test program for a more ambitious Phase II program in FY 2005/2006.  In Phase II, two 4-person and two 7-person Ovatek rigid life rafts will be deployed on the Grand Banks for a month long field trial during the fall of the year.  The SAR objects will be configured as in Phase I.  The objective will be to collect leeway and drift data for the limiting load and drag configurations in wind speeds up to 50 knots, consistent with previous leeway work carried by the proponents.

Upon completion of the Phase II field program, an analysis will be carried out combining Phase I and Phase II data.  Regression relationships for leeway speed on wind speed will be derived in accordance with previous practice for which high correlations have been obtained.  In earlier work, the dispersion of leeway angle off the downwind direction was found, in general, to be quite large, possibly a consequence of positional errors from data recorded at relatively short time intervals.

An objective of the analysis of leeway angle will be to increase the precision of the leeway angular dispersion by investigating the effects of longer averaging periods under the time-varying wind conditions.  Increasing the precision of the leeway angular dispersion for SAR objects will serve to reduce search areas, search times, and SAR resource requirements.  The project final report will be delivered by the end of FY 2005/2006.

CCGA-P Marine Simulator Program

The Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary Pacific Region (CCGA-P) would like to develop and implement a new volunteer search and rescue (SAR) training program that employs emerging technology to improve the safety, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of the existing SAR training program and the effectiveness of current marine SAR operations throughout Canada.

The technology that would be utilized in this program would also be used to educate the public in the fields of SAR prevention and boating safety. Further, by piloting this equipment which has not been used in this capacity in Canada, the CCGA-P will develop a detailed training program, work closely with the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary Central & Arctic Region (CCGA C&A) to implement their own simulator training program, and make this information available to the rest of the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary throughout Canada, and any other interested SAR groups.

The CCGA-P is a marine search and rescue organization composed of 1,400 volunteers that respond to marine SAR incidents 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Volunteers currently receive a limited amount of on-water training to prepare them for SAR response, but financial constraints limit the amount of training that can be provided. By purchasing a marine simulator and integrating it into the existing training program, the CCGA-P would be able to improve the quality and quantity of training that takes place, which in turn increases the SAR effectiveness and safety of SAR crewmembers. These valuable improvements would be made in a cost-effective manner, as costly on-water training hours would not need to increase.

The simulator would also be used in the CCGA-P boating safety program, and would allow CCGA-P members to educate the public with a dynamic and attractive interactive boating safety tool. Once the program has been piloted in the Paciifc region, it will be implemented in the Central & Arctic region of the CCGA, and then in any other interested CCGA regions. Finally, all of the information gathered through the simulation project would be compiled and made available to other interested marine SAR organizations, and the CCGA-P will be available to assist these groups when necessary.

SAR Exercise Program for Major Marine and Aviation Disasters

The purpose of the project is to prepare and plan tabletop and live exercises in Quebec Region. Basically, the exercises aim to raise awareness among the various organizations, passenger ship operators and airport authorities near the St. Lawrence of the potential impact of disasters involving a large number of passengers and to strengthen responder collaboration for actual emergencies. The exercises would also make it possible to meet the objectives of the provincial Public Security Plan in the event of major disasters involving a large number of passengers (responsibility of the du Ministère de la Sécurité Publique du Québec)). The distribution of responsibilities among response levels can present special challenges; only through planned exercises will we be able to avert or overcome all the potential difficulties.
Essentially, then, the purpose of the program is to mitigate the impact of a major disaster by enabling more effective co-ordination among the various response organizations. 

The first part of the program will be to prepare and organize four tabletop exercises in FY 2005-2006 involving three marine disasters and one aeronautical disaster.

Following analysis of the results of these four exercises, two live exercises would be prepared for the beginning of 2006-2007, involving one marine incident and one aviation incident.

The live exercises would involve federal organizations (CCG, Transport Canada, Parks Canada and the CF), provincial agencies and organizations (Sûreté du Québec/ Ministère de la Sécurité Publique du Québec)/Société des traversiers du Québec), municipal agencies (City of Montreal Police Service ) and private groups that are likely to have to organize a concerted response.

The emergency preparedness plans of the CCG, DND and the Province of Quebec would be amended to enable a greater degree of harmonization among them, and a planning guide would be prepared for distribution to small excursion boat operators.
Finally, a video would be produced to create a lasting record of instructional value (the video would have a useful life of 10 years).
Reference: exercise Tadoussac May 2004 / 2004 workshop on contingency planning for major marine disasters.

Man Overboard Recovery Equipment on a T-1200

T-1200s are heavy-tonnage CCGSs with a very high freeboard. They are occasionally exposed to severe weather. At present, there is no equipment capable of hoisting a man overboard back on board a T-1200. Since we cannot change the structural variables of the T-1200, we have to experiment with equipment that will make it possible to mount recovery operations of this kind safely and efficiently.

Marine Marker for Common SAR Objects C-Core to find a multi-application marine marker for CCG, SAR resources that is easily deployable, reliable, cost effective, and have the ability to survive in the harshest marine enviornments.  To improve search operations, saving valuable search time.