Charting Service Needs a Lifeline

BoatUS Magazine September, 2007

Federal advisory committee makes recommendations to NOAA

If you and your family were planning a road trip to see the U.S. and your automobile was equipped with the latest GPS device, would you expect its electronic files to be based on data from the 1940s?

While this may sound ridiculous, that is exactly what mariners may be getting when they fire up their GPS chartplotters and use chart programs based on data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). About half of the soundings marked on U.S. nautical charts were taken by lead lines prior to the 1940s. But is anyone concerned?

A federal advisory committee of maritime and boating stakeholders charged with making recommendations to NOAA on its navigation services is alarmed enough to publish a special report that is being circulated on Capitol Hill and used in briefings and hearings to support adequate funding for FY ’08.

Updating and modernizing U.S. nautical charts has taken a far back seat to a host of NOAA programs and services. If more resources are not forthcoming, U.S. waterways face a growing risk of maritime accidents, perhaps major ones such as oil spills or cruise ship accidents, says the report by the Hydrographic Services Review Panel, the formal name of the advisory committee chartered by Congress five years ago. Members include port pilots, private sector hydrographic surveyors, directors of port authorities and cruise lines, state officials, as well as three retired admirals and a representative from BoatUS.

The bottom line for boaters is to not presume the numbers popping up on your chartplotter’s screen are exact or that all underwater obstructions are marked. “Depending on a boater’s location, the NOAA backlog of charting and surveying work can render these products slightly to grossly inaccurate,” warns the report’s section on recreational boating. “The information could be years or even decades out of date.”

The shrinking resources allocated to the National Ocean Service, the agency within NOAA responsible for navigation services, are compounded by the steady growth in maritime traffic. Not only do 70 million recreational boaters travel U.S. waters each year, they share it with 5 million cruise ship passengers, 175 million ferry passengers, and ships transporting 2 billion tons of overseas cargo, plus 720 million short tons of lake and inland waterway cargo, according to the report.

Lack of adequate funding for the NOS navigation work in favor of more “popular” programs such as climate change, ocean observing systems, weather services and marine mammals, have created a backlog of hydrographic survey work that appears unlikely to get caught up unless the funding picture drastically improves.

“You can’t fund everything but hopefully this report will help NOAA take a look at all these programs and help them prioritize their main needs,” said Scott Rainey, chairman of the panel. A licensed captain, former harbor pilot and BoatUS member, he presented the report at Capitol Hill Oceans Week earlier this summer.

Of the panel’s five “Most Wanted” improvements, recreational boaters have the biggest stake in item number one: Aggressively Map the Nation’s Shorelines and Navigationally Significant Waters.

Of all the findings, this is likely the most difficult for the agency to address because of the size of the job. To put it simply, at current resources, the report finds that it would take 166 years for NOS to survey or re-survey the nation’s 500,000 square nautical miles (SNM) of “navigationally significant” areas. These are defined as areas that carry major maritime traffic and are in most need of being surveyed because of their importance to commerce and the military. NOS’s current capacity is 3,000 SNM per year using both in-house NOAA ships and outside contractors. To even get on a 50-year re-survey schedule, NOS would have to cover 10,000 SNM a year.

Equally alarming, 40% of the nation’s 95,000 miles of shoreline has not been mapped since 1960, the report finds (see map). Some areas of the U.S. shoreline, mostly in Alaska, have never been mapped using modern standards. Accurate shoreline mapping is not only critical to boaters, who do the majority of their navigating near the coast, and coastal homeowners, but shoreline data is needed by coastal managers, agencies that set boundaries, for emergency response such as after hurricanes, and managing marine resources. NOAA can currently map about 3% of U.S. shorelines per year.

Boat operators should be aware that the smaller waterways and harbors, which carry the vast majority of recreational traffic, are at the bottom of the priority list of waterways that need to be surveyed. The agency’s national survey plan gives top ranking to waterways by the commercial tonnage and hazardous cargo they carry so major shipping ports are at the top of the list. To cover all of these is already a decade-plus backlog.

Despite the gloomy outlook, there are a few rays of hope. Another of the report’s “most wanted” items is greater use of mobile, fast-response survey units that provide tremendous value for low cost. Fortunately, in the NOAA ’08 budget there is money to add two National Response Team survey boats to the current fleet of six. These trailerable vessels can address acute problems in the smaller waterways. They were critical to the rapid reopening of the Mississippi River to vessel traffic following hurricanes Katrina and Rita, when over 100 ships were backed up waiting to enter 13 ports with food, fuel and relief supplies. Between emergencies, this fleet can fill in to do survey work in some of the less critical harbors.

Another positive development has been the “print-on-demand” charts from Ocean Grafix, the sanctioned NOAA-partner, which sells charts updated with the latest Local Notices to Mariners corrections. These will show surface corrections such as missing markers or lights, however, like all private chart producers, the depth measurements they use also come from NOAA.

“In the near-term the ’08 budget request is a start,” said Capt. Steve Barnum, the head of the Office of Coast Survey, which is responsible for the mapping and charting program. “For the long-term, the requirements for this work far outstrip our resources.” Barnum said NOS is drafting an action plan to address the five major “most wanted” items in the panel’s report, which should be ready this month when the panel reconvenes in Seattle.

Other ways to address the NOS shortfalls is to better leverage survey work done by other agencies to benefit nautical charts, Barnum added. Unfortunately, because NOAA bears liability for its data, its standards for how data is collected are strict and oftentimes what they get from other projects is unusable for nautical charts. Better integration of coastal mapping efforts is also on the “most wanted” list.

The report also highlights an alarming 64% decrease in NOAA’s fleet of ships equipped to conduct hydrographic surveys since the 1990s. Even though a keel was laid in June for a new high-tech multihull, the Ferdinand Hassler, NOAA has gone from a high point of 11 hydrographic ships down to four, all of them nearing 40 years old. The Hassler will replace the aging ship Rude. “The ships are aging out and there are no plans on the drawing board,” said Rainey. “These are 30- and 40-year-old ships and I really worry about that.”

NOAA has begun a ship recapitalization study but to get new ships designed and built — and funded by Congress — will take years and Rainey also believes the negative fallout of the Coast Guard’s disastrous Deep Water program may hurt the prospects for a ship-building effort in Congress.

The panel’s report urges NOAA to invest in new, multi-platform vessels that can perform several functions. The agency’s total fleet of 18 ships are all specialized for one purpose, such as fisheries, climate and ocean research, and hydrography. Barnum did say they are working on ways to make better use of some of the data collection being conducted by non-survey ships.

To help close the gap, NOAA has hired more outside hydrographic contractors and the HSRP report calls for an increase in contracting out. “There is simply no way to achieve 10,000 SNM a year without contract support,” the report states. While contract work has gone from zero in 1994 to $30 million per year, about half of the hydrographic budget, the panels calls for NOAA to make more and better use of private contractors, as this will also alleviate the NOAA fleet shortfalls that appear certain to come in the next decade.

Boaters on the Delaware River were harshly impacted in a number of ways by the shortcomings of charts. An enormous discarded anchor and two other undetected submerged objects ripped open the hull of the oil tanker Athos I in 2004 and spoiled 115 miles of the Delaware River, including damage to boats, marinas, wildlife and aquatic plants. Why did it happen? The lack of a full bottom coverage survey of a major shipping channel into New Jersey left the objects undetected, until it was too late. The cleanup costs of this one accident exceeded $150 million, more than the NOS navigation services budget for one year.
— By Elaine Dickinson
To read the full “Most Wanted” report, go to http://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/ocs/hsrp/hsrp.htm
© BoatUS Magazine September 2007
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