Out-of-control sailboat smashes against the rocks: prompt rescue avoids dramatic ending

Redondo Beach Harbor Rescue - walking along the pier yesterday and had to call 911.

Wind and waves took the sailboat up on the break wall. Brave lifeguard dove in and saved the boat and sailor. 

From Int. Yachting Media 

Among the various user comments, there is one that best summarizes the extraordinary nature of the event : “I can’t believe the boat can still float!”.
Actually, it is a miracle that that poor out-of-control sailboat, strongly thrown against the cliff by the wind and waves, is not sunk.
A miracle made possible also by the providential intervention of a courageous lifeguard that rescued the sailboat’s owner while the lifeguard boat was towing the boat away from the bank wall.
The following is the video posted on YouTube: more than one million and 300 thousand views for a dramatic accident with happy ending.

The video clearly shows how difficult was the task of towing the sailboat, out-of-control and repeatedly slammed against the rocks.

Any possible maneuver was made impossible by the fury of the mistral wind, which did not stop blowing even at dusk, and the merciless strength of waves.
Fortunately, however, the owner managed to do the only thing to do: to call the 24/7-operative 9-1-1 single emergency number.

Redondo Beach Harbor with the GeoGarage platform (NOAA chart)

The accident, in fact, occurred in the Redondo Beach Harbour, California, where the American Coast Guard rescue units are always on the alert to promptly respond to the numerous and sudden SOS requests from broken-down boats or vessels in critical conditions like this.
Moreover, the ocean is not a joke and there are many accidents occurring along the US coast every day.

In this case, the rescuer was particularly heroic since he not only jumped into the water, swam to the boat and tied the ropes with great dexterity to make the towing operation possible but also rescued the boat owner, who otherwise would have hit against the rocks, thus avoiding a decidedly fatal epilogue.

The extent of boat damage was not reported.
But we supposed that both the hull, the starboard side, the stern and the outboard will need an important refitting intervention.
Anyway, all’s well that ends well.
And welcome to videos like this: they can be useful tutorials to avoid situations like this.

The plan to map every coral reef on Earth – from space

From UNEP

In October 2020, Australian scientists found a detached coral reef skyscraper on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef—nearly 500 meters tall and 1.5 kilometres wide— that exceeds the height of the Eiffel Tower and New York’s Empire State Building.
This was the first discovery of its kind in 120 years.

It also signals a challenge – that we know relatively little about what lies underwater, given the high costs and still-nascent technology of ocean exploration.

To better understand the mysteries of the world’s oceans, a team of scientists is using satellite imaging to map out, in unprecedented detail, one of the planet’s most iconic underwater ecosystems: the shallow coral reef.

The researchers are part of the Allen Coral Atlas project, which is led by Vulcan, a philanthropic organization created by late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is working with Vulcan to build capacities of coral reef practitioners, managers and policy-makers around the world, especially in developing countries, on how to use the new Atlas.

“The atlas is meant to improve our understanding of our coral reef systems and drive better evidence-based policies to protect corals,” says Chuck Cooper, Managing Director of Government and Community Relations at Vulcan.
 

 

 Corals under threat

A diver points to damaged coral on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, Photo by Reuters

Coral reefs foster one-quarter of all marine species and provide food, livelihoods, security and recreation for at least a billion people.
But, pollution, overfishing and heatwaves due to climate change are threatening their existence.

Most coral reefs are still unmapped.
Scientists are aiming to monitor, in real-time, these biodiverse underwater worlds to protect and restore them.
Further, they want to identify patches of coral that are naturally more resistant to climate change.
These “refugia” may hold secrets to learning how to mitigate the impact of warming seas on coral reefs.

The atlas, available to the public, uses satellite technology to create high-resolution images of corals that are then processed into detailed maps.
The maps capture features that will allow scientists and the conservation community to compare coral reef health over time and understand the pressures reefs are facing.

The atlas will provide baselines for monitoring coral reef bleaching events and other short-term changes, evidence to inform policymaking, and compelling science to capture the public’s interest on the plight of corals.

Bleaching occurs when coral—tiny animals that secrete calcium carbonate for protection—become stressed by factors such as warm water or pollution.
As a result, they expel the microscopic symbiotic algae called zooxanthellae, which reside within their tissues.
The corals then turn ghostly white; they become ‘bleached’ (watch these coral bleaching explainer videos).

The origins of the atlas

 

Reef fish swim above recovering coral colonies on the Great Barrier Reef.

Photo by Lucas Jackson/ Reuters

Three years ago, Paul Allen charged Vulcan with saving the world’s corals, says Paulina Gerstner, the Allen Coral Atlas Program Manager.
“As a technologist, he saw tremendous data gaps and challenged us to figure out how to apply the emerging availability of satellite imagery to map and monitor the world’s coral reefs.
All of them.”

Allen – an avid scuba diver – was deeply committed to the protection of marine ecosystems.
He was already funding coral research, but his concern intensified in 2017 when Allen found his favourite reef dive sites bleached and dying.
That’s when he tasked the team with the ambitious goal of mapping the world’s corals.
(Allen died in 2018.)

“Our goal is to make conservation restoration and protection much easier, affordable and faster for all conservationists around the world,” says Gerstner.

“In the face of inaction, coral reefs will soon disappear,” says Leticia Carvalho, the Coordinator of UNEP’s Marine and Freshwater Branch.
“Humanity must act with evidence-based urgency towards effective ecosystem management and protection to change the trajectory.”

UNEP is training officials in coastal states on how to use the atlas and supporting efforts to develop policies that safeguard coral reefs.
Alongside Vulcan, which is funding the project, other partners include the University of Queensland, Planet Inc., Arizona State University and the National Geographic Society.

An instrumental tool

In May 2020, a long-standing partner of UNEP, the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI), called on its 44 member states, which are home to 75 percent of the world’s coral reefs, to step up their conservation efforts.
Francis Staub, the ICRI Secretariat Coordinator, says the atlas will be instrumental in that process, helping countries understand “where coral reefs are and the area they cover.”

The atlas uses images from Planet Labs, which operates the world's largest fleet of Earth-observing satellites.
Daily, the Planet Labs' satellites photograph Earth's entire surface in minute detail.
Researchers will analyze the satellite images and produce maps that catalogue the depths of reefs and their location, while differentiating them from other underwater phenomena, including seagrasses, rocks and sand.

The atlas coincides with the launch of two major environmental campaigns: the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

Notable coral reefs that have been mapped include the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and systems in Fiji, the Bahamas and Hawaii.
The project aims to have 100 per cent of the world’s reefs mapped by the summer of 2021.

Europe’s satellites could help catch the next climate disaster

The European Space Agency’s Sentinel-3 satellite captures snow cover and clouds across the Alps on Dec. 14.
Credit: ESA/Copernicus

From Bloomberg by Jonathan Tirone

The European Space Agency has taken the lead in building planetary simulations to predict major climate disruption.

Spain began the new year battling Storm Filomena, a once-in-a-generation weather event that blanketed Madrid in snow and paralyzed the economy.
Health workers were stranded, supermarkets shut, and the army was called in.
At least four people died.

“Now, consider a government or company that knew two weeks ago there was a risk that this would happen,” said Francisco Doblas-Reyes, a physicist at Barcelona’s Supercomputing Center.
“Knowing the risk that a 1-in-20-year event was going to happen would have given more possibilities to prepare.”

 

This handout image released by the European Space Agency on 19 November, 2020, shows the Sentinel-6 satellite, dedicated to measuring sea levels as part of the European Union's Copernicus Earth Observation.

(Photo credit: AFP PHOTO/ European Space Agency)

Doblas-Reyes and his team are working on complex models that they hope can better detect the next Filomena, a job that’s become increasingly important as climate change makes weather more unpredictable — and extreme.
The data collected by European satellites is at the heart of the continent’s multibillion-euro Destination Earth program seeking to develop the world’s best digital simulation of Earth.

“We have the gold standard of satellite infrastructure in space,” said Josef Aschbacher, the geophysicist who’ll become Director General of the European Space Agency this year.
Europe’s space agency has 16 Earth observation satellites in orbit with some three dozen under development and, according to Aschbacher, is in talks with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration to assume even greater responsibility for climate monitoring in the next decade.

As U.S. climate research took a backseat to human spaceflight, deep-space exploration and the creation of a military force for outer space during the Trump administration, European scientists have focused on finding new ways to understand the changing atmosphere.
In November, the EU launched a satellite on board a NASA-backed Space X rocket that can track miniscule changes in sea levels, down to the millimeter.
New projects are underway to monitor freshwater flows and greenhouse gas emissions, technical challenges akin to forecasting how a drop of ink will disperse inside a choppy pond.

By using artificial intelligence and supercomputers, the first digital-twin simulations of Earth could be ready by 2028, according to Aschbacher.
The ESA’s data is publicly available, allowing everyone from the scientists in Barcelona to farmers and insurers to improve their own models at the same time.
“If you really want to make it useful, you have to make sure the information is available in a way that people can visually use it,” he said.
“What the people really want to know isn't just the status of today but a projection of the future.”

The Sentinel-6 updates maps of the oceans covering 70% of the planet every 10 days.
Credit: European Space Agency

U.S.researchers running their own Earth-system simulations — an idea first conceived by Vice President Al Gore in the 1990s — say the EU has taken the lead in boosting climate-model resolutions.
The new tools will enable researchers to drill down and detect changing patterns within a kilometer area, compared with about 10 square kilometers at present.
That should give scientists new insight into phenomena like cloud formation and how ocean eddies transport heat.

The new climate models also have the potential to help investors make better decisions.
Storms, fires and floods killed at least 8,200 people and cost the world $210 billion in insured losses in 2020, according to a report published this month by Munich Re.
Those damages could swell as the world inches closer to crossing the 1.5 degree Celsius warming threshold that scientists predict will lead to more frequent superstorms and higher sea levels.

“There’s a lot of information there but too much information is also bad,” European Central Bank Governing Council member Robert Holzmann said in a November interview.
“You cannot get the right signals from it.
The information has to be brought down to a handful or two of criteria that are the most critical.”

To solve that problem, European scientists are working on a series of easy-to-read climate indexes that could inform investment decisions in the future, according to EU documents.
They’ve teamed up with traders and weather analysts from European utilities including Electricite de France, EDP Renovaveis SA and Vattenfall AB to develop such tools — with varying degrees of success.

“Meteorologists at EnBW trust the science and statistical methods on which the tool is based,” said Michael Christoph, a weather analyst at German utility Energie Baden-Wuerttemberg AG.
“However, building the same trust among energy traders will take some time.”

Monthly seasonal forecasts of temperature, precipitation and atmospheric pressure need to increase levels of accuracy
Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service

At present, seasonal weather models published by the ESA’s climate service aren’t always up to the task of supporting longer-term investment decisions because they aren’t calibrated to catch events like Storm Filomena and only generate broad probabilistic forecasts.
But that could change in coming years as 8 billion euros pours into a new generation of supercomputers capable of calculating billions of equations every second, according to Doblas-Reyes.

“There is a continuum of information that these companies need, information ranging from the next hour to the next day to the next weeks,” he said.
“We need to help government prepare and companies to profit from these events.”

The global transition to remote and autonomous operations

Take a virtual tour around our state-of-the-art remote operations centre in Aberdeen.

As part of our global network of remote operation centres, it offers data processing, satellite positioning, remote piloting and surveying and inspection of offshore assets.

From Hydro by Hugh Parker & Ross MacFarlane

The Benefits and Challenges Facing the Maritime Industry

Over the next five years, we will witness a significant reduction in the maritime industry’s reliance on larger vessels, as the focus on compact and agile uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) increases and a wider transition towards remote marine operations continues to gather momentum.
The benefits as well as the legal framework challenges of remote and autonomous operations will have a profound impact on the energy and maritime industries.

The ability to plan, manage and monitor offshore projects, and to maintain assets and infrastructure, through remote operations and autonomous capabilities is increasingly critical within the energy and maritime industries.
Through their flexible deployment and good connectivity with onshore remote operations centres (ROCs), USVs can acquire data to support these objectives faster than ever before.

Safety and Sustainability

USVs also provide significant benefits when it comes to safety: used as force multipliers alongside crewed parent vessels, they allow crewed vessels to remain at a safe distance from assets such as wind turbines and avoid unnecessary risk for those onboard.
This has the potential to translate into a 100% reduction in human exposure to hazardous offshore environments where, rather than transmitting their situational awareness and vessel status data to personnel onboard parent vessels, USVs will ultimately be solely controlled from the safety of an onshore location, such as one of Fugro’s ROCs.

Additionally, clients are increasingly looking to reduce the environmental impact of their operations in line with the zero emission targets presented in the UK government’s Maritime 2050 route map.
The global transition towards remote and autonomous working will help to reduce the greenhouse gases emitted by the maritime industry, as hybrid USVs consume up to 95% less fuel than conventional vessels.

However, despite these obvious advantages, as innovation outpaces regulation, the legal framework in which USVs operate remains a challenge.

Fugro’s Blue Shadow next-generation uncrewed surface vehicle.

Maritime Legislation for Uncrewed Vessels

The safety of life at sea is a core value of all maritime authorities around the globe.
The current maritime legislation has been carefully crafted over many decades with the safety of the mariner at its core; however, we are now transitioning to a future where vessels no longer have a mariner onboard, which creates a gap in the current legislation.
This poses an interesting problem of how to legislate for both crewed and uncrewed vessels operating side by side.

Safety Standards

As is the case with the rapid development of any new technology, it is challenging to create fixed ruling that leaves room for constant innovation and the continued progression of new methods of working.

One of the first attempts at this will be the revised workboat code being developed by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA), expected by the start of 2022.
The workboat code document will apply to commercial vessels up to 24m long and include new regulations covering MASS.
This reflects the fact that many USVs in development or already operating are smaller than their conventional crewed vessel counterparts.

The focus of this forthcoming legislation is expected to shift from the safety of crew onboard to the safety of other seagoing vessels and the wider environment.
This is particularly the case with the adoption and creation of rules to ensure that vessels can maintain an awareness of their surroundings and take appropriate action to prevent incidents.
At present, vessels have two clear ways to achieve this: through remote monitoring and control by a human operator and/or using onboard situational awareness and collision avoidance software.

Fugro’s Blue Shadow hydrographic survey operations displayed onscreen in a Fugro remote operations centre.

Trusting Uncrewed and Remote Technology

Much like self-driving cars, societal acceptance is crucial to the adoption of these new technologies, where they are expected to work correctly 100% of the time with no margin for error.
While collision avoidance systems are being developed to improve USVs’ navigation safety, the question of public trust remains: can we trust a USV to be left alone at sea and respond as a conventional crewed vessel would? If not, how do we ensure that the people who are remotely monitoring and controlling them have the same situational awareness as they would onboard?

The regulations which eventually come into force will need to balance the developmental freedom to truly revolutionize the way in which the maritime industry operates with the ongoing protection of those human lives still at sea, while also improving safety standards and protecting the environment.

Trialled and Tested USV Operations

Fugro’s Blue Shadow is a globally deployed, next-generation 9m autonomous and uncrewed hydrographic survey platform delivering nearshore seabed insights faster.
Part of Fugro’s overall hydrographic solution, Blue Shadow is one of many from its fleet of USVs ranging from 9m to 24m, within the suite of remote and autonomous capabilities that are more sustainable when compared to conventional vessels.
Sustainability of USVs is an advantage built into their design concept from the beginning: vessels whose function is purely to survey and acquire data can of course be much smaller than traditional vessels, which are designed to transport people and cargo.

Fugro recently completed its first remotely operated hydrographic survey using Blue Shadow to capture hydrographic and bathymetric data to support safe navigation, nautical charting, marine site characterization and resource management activities.

Fugro’s Blue Shadow performing its autonomous survey trials off the coast of Portchester, UK.

Executed during challenging environmental conditions, including waves of up to 2m, the compact, wave-piercing design of the USV allowed it to acquire high-quality data in conditions that would have been unworkable for conventional vessels.
This lengthening of the potential work window increases surety of project delivery, providing more opportunities throughout the year to acquire much-needed data for clients.

The survey operations also achieved, depending on the sea conditions, a 61% to 96% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions through significantly reduced fuel consumption.
Moreover, the innovative collision avoidance and advanced spatial awareness technology built into the Blue Shadow ensured its autonomous operations met the highest safety standards.

What Next?

While the development and deployment of new remote and autonomous solutions progress, the legal framework will continue to play an essential role in influencing the design and engineering parameters for next-generation USVs and other MASS.
We are currently in a critical phase of the global transition to remote and autonomous maritime operations and it is essential that the legal framework is swiftly put in place to allow these technologies to flourish.

Fugro’s Blue Essence USV, part of Fugro’s remote and autonomous operations solution, carrying out inspection operations.

Links :

• OE : Subsea Technology and the New Routes to Residency

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