If you were fishing or boating on the Chesapeake Bay the last Sunday in July, you remember how the afternoon went from tranquility to mayhem in a matter of minutes.
A powerful storm fueled by near-100 degree temperatures announced its arrival with blinding rain, vicious winds and bursts of lightning. Emergency and mayday calls filled the airwaves and sent rescue vessels out into the caldron.
Natural Resources Police responded to 11 calls, ranging from capsized boats to a vessel taking on water. A personal watercraft rider racing for the safety of Sandy Point State Park was killed just below the Bay Bridge when lightning struck nearby.
At the Coast Guard command center at Curtis Bay, personnel began getting the first calls at 3:25 p.m. By the time dispatchers were through two hours later, they had responded to 42 distress calls, resulting in more than 100 people assisted or rescued.
"I have been working this job for more than five years, and I have never seen this happen before," said Petty Officer 1st Class Jason Stanley, a search-and-rescue coordinator.
Luckily, the safety net around Chesapeake Bay anglers and boaters is getting a bit more snug.
The Maryland Law Enforcement Information Network (MLEIN), Maryland's camera- and radar-driven surveillance system capable of tracking bad guys, good guys and folks in trouble, will be up and running next month.
The Coast Guard has improved the airwaves with Rescue 21, a network of towers that can lock onto a distress call with a greater degree of accuracy than the old system, called Legacy.
Both of those advancements couldn't come at a better time. Curtis Bay, which on average handles 375 cases annually, has already logged 430 this year. And the Natural Resources Police recorded their busiest summer ever on the bay.
"People think that because it's inland water it's safer, but water is water," said Lt. Sara Wallace, the Coast Guard's command center chief at Curtis Bay. "Anything can happen and happen quickly. It's shocking how quickly a vessel can go under."
The Curtis Bay, Delaware Bay and Hampton Roads, Va., Coast Guard stations all have Rescue 21, providing coverage for 3,000 miles of the bay, its tributaries and lakes. Eventually, the nationwide system will cover more than 95,000 miles of coastline, rivers and waterways.
Legacy used towers with overlapping coverage areas to mark the vicinity of a mayday call.
But the coverage area had gaps, and the sound quality of calls made under duress were often poor. Knowing that every second counts, dispatchers scrambled to make sense of a call, playing back audiotapes and reviewing transmission data from the towers in an effort to narrow a search area.
"A lot of times when people panicked or their boat was going down fast with a lot of background noise, it would take hours to track back and pinpoint an area," Wallace said.
Rescue 21 employs advanced direction-finding technology that is invaluable on a bay known for its watery capillaries and coves that create a coastline of 11,684 miles. "Lines of bearing" from the towers intersect to create a small wedge that can be quickly searched.
Hoax calls — often made from land — are easier to detect, and noise-canceling equipment makes real distress calls easier to understand.
"We have boat owners who have named their boats Payday, which can cause confusion. We also have bodies of water with the same name that adds to the complexity of our operation," Wallace said. "So we're saving money on things we obviously would have responded to before."
In addition, Rescue 21 can tie a cell phone into the radio system and allow conference calls so that a flight surgeon can speak to the operator of a disabled boat or an interpreter can communicate with the captain of a large commercial ship.
The Coast Guard has done a cost and time comparison using a simulated emergency on the lower Potomac River.
With the Legacy system, command center dispatchers would have been unable to substantially narrow the search area, requiring the use of two helicopters for three hours each to check the ins and outs of the Potomac and lower Patuxent watersheds. Cost: $46,800.
Rescue 21 reduces the search zone to 6 square miles, an area that can be covered by a small boat in 30 minutes. Cost: $1,825.
But all of that technology is only as good as the boaters and equipment at the other end, Wallace said.
"If he or she is talking over Channel 16, we can pinpoint him. But if he's doesn't have a radio and is relying on his cell phone — and that's happening a lot — we can't, and that makes rescue a lot slower," she said. "Then time becomes the enemy."
candy.thomson@baltsun.com
To see the National Weather Service hour-by-hour breakdown of the storm, go to: http://www.erh.noaa.gov/lwx/events/squall_line_20100725.
