Storm Warning

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina battered the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) headquarters in Mississippi, where more than 100 SAIC employees provide on-site support. SAIC Program Manager Steve Beaudet, his wife, and three children were inside those buildings when Katrina struck.

The buildings took the full brunt of the storm; NDBC headquarters sits northeast of New Orleans and upstream from the mouth of the Pearl River, where the hurricane center came ashore.

Fortunately, the NDBC buildings were built to withstand a Category 4 hurricane and provided safe shelter for NDBC and SAIC employees and their families to ride out the storm. But surrounding communities were devastated. Many like the Beaudet family lost virtually everything, including their homes.

Once Katrina moved on, the danger was not over. While the Beaudet family and other SAIC employees stayed in the NDBC building for several days until other shelter was available, Steve Beaudet and other SAIC staff worked to get the warning systems back up and operating.

Keeping the warning system operational

SAIC Executive Vice President Arnold Punaro lauded their efforts. "It was a tremendous performance. In under a week, the critical warning systems were up and the data was streaming back to customers all over the world. While their own situation was devastated by disaster, their concern was for others who rely on these warning systems."

NDBC and SAIC staff knew better than most the need for urgency. NDBC's parent division — the National Weather Service — and parent agency — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — had been predicting another intense hurricane season, or rather, another one to two decades of intense hurricane seasons.

Beaudet and his staff worried that the next major hurricane could follow quickly. That's exactly what happened when Category 3 Hurricane Rita slammed into Texas and Louisiana less than three weeks later.

Early in 2005, they had rushed to deploy new hurricane warning buoys in the Eastern Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico before the 2005 hurricane season started. And when Hurricanes Dennis and Katrina threatened, our staff helped make sure those buoys transmitted an uninterrupted flow of important ocean and weather data to NDBC headquarters, and from there, into the National Weather Service information pipeline. That information helped give our own staff — along with hundreds of thousands of other Atlantic and Gulf Coast residents — better early warning.

Out of harm's way

This is all part of a larger NOAA vision: to protect the entire coastline of the United States. What makes this so critical now?

More than half (53 percent) of our nation's population now lives along our coasts. Triggered by the previous devastating hurricane season and tsunami, President Bush and Congress approved funding for an integrated system of warning stations on buoys, near-shore platforms, and land-based sites that could protect more than 12,300 miles of U.S. coastline. The new mission for NDBC and SAIC is to turn this vision into reality.

Beaudet and his staff will help establish this warning network — called the Integrated Ocean Observing System — under a new NDBC contract.

The first building blocks to make up the new network are two existing buoy arrays that we were instrumental in transitioning to NDBC: an array of tsunami warning buoys in the northern Pacific (see sidebar right), and the hurricane warning array that stretches along our eastern seaboard, across the equatorial Atlantic (to monitor new hurricanes emerging off the coast of west Africa), and even across the equatorial Pacific (to monitor El Niño conditions.)

Expanding on every front

NDBC has buoy arrays in other areas, but more are needed to protect the large U.S. coastline. To ramp up quickly into the much larger Integrated Ocean Observing System, the NDBC and SAIC have a new strategy, says Beaudet. The plan is to link NDBC arrays together and with ocean monitoring systems run by universities, oil and gas companies, and other organizations.

To make this a reality, "we're revamping the systems architecture to create an overall network that's more manageable, scalable, flexible, and cost-effective," he says. "At the same time, it has to be able to handle more data, and many more different types of data from different sources.

What are the biggest challenges? "We're expanding in every direction, on every front at once," says Brian Musselman, a retired Coast Guard officer who is now SAIC's department manager on this program. "We have to come up with more innovation to work at this faster operational tempo. And there are a lot of technical challenges we have to meet. That appealed to me," he adds with quiet confidence. "I like the idea of doing something you have to work for."

A global vision

But NOAA has an even bigger vision: a worldwide ocean-observing network. The Integrated Ocean Observing System in U.S. coastal waters could be one piece of this larger network as would the new regional tsunami warning system that NOAA is working on for the Indian Ocean, says Beaudet.

With the new emphasis on the ocean, "NDBC sits in an enviable position — that of an organization poised for growth and with a mechanism to do just that," says Paul Moersdorf, Ph.D., director of NDBC.

"This worldwide network could be the largest scientific undertaking the planet has ever embarked on," says Beaudet. The opportunity to advance this kind of global vision is why he joined SAIC in 2000.

There's no question this is a different kind of job. "Marine creatures love to set up shop with us," says SAIC Program Manager Steve Beaudet. "Birds like to roost on the instrumentation. Sea lions like to rest on the buoys."

And there's no question it takes a different caliber of person to do this job. Because those 200- to 600-pound sea lions are not always the friendly creatures seen at amusement parks. "They're quite territorial," says Senior Field Engineer Steve Jacobs. "Off the Southern California coast, some of the largest buoys can have 20 or 30 sea lions. Usually the boat scares them off, but sometimes it has to keep circling the buoy to keep them from getting back up there while you're working."

To keep the National Data Buoy Center's at-sea and ashore instrumentation and buoys in good working condition, SAIC has a team of marine, mechanical, communications, electrical, and systems engineers. The hours can be long, the work demanding. Jacobs remembers one trip where the station was on a remote deserted island in the Pacific Northwest and he camped out with his sleeping bag and food and water for seven days waiting for the boat to return.

One of our most experienced field engineers, Jacobs has been working on NDBC and NOAA buoys for over 15 years. "I think he knows every monitoring station by name and number," says SAIC Department Manager Brian Musselman.

What's the most dangerous incident that ever happened to Jacobs? "We crashed in a helicopter," he replies calmly.

Over 10 years ago, Jacobs and his partner were working on a station on a tower near the entrance to New York Harbor. "It was our last station before coming home," he remembers. The government helicopter bringing them back was trying to land and the flight mechanic was leaning out the back door helping guide the pilots in. Then it happened.

"One second we were hovering above the helipad and the next we were underwater." According to witnesses on the ground, the helicopter crashed onto the helipad, flipped over its back, then slid off the helipad and fell 120 feet into the water.

The impact blew the windows out. Both pilots were killed. The flight mechanic was severely injured and Jacobs and his partner helped him swim to safety. Miraculously, they received only minor injuries.

Was he scared to fly again? "I had nightmares for about two months until I got back on another helicopter, went back to that station and finished the job. I haven't had any nightmares since."

"We all have stories like that," he shrugs, speaking of the other SAIC field crew.

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