(pbn.com)
The University of Rhode Island recently partnered with a marine research group and a Providence-based engineering firm to study issues of coexistence of tourism and recreational and commercial industry activities on Narragansett Bay.
The two-year, $155,000 study will be funded by a grant from the URI Transportation Center, matched by funds from the Maguire Group Inc. and Marine Safety International Inc., a port improvement researcher, which has a center in Newport.
The study will be conducted by students from the URI Graduate School of Oceanography and led by Candace Oviatt, director of URI’s Marine Ecosystems Research Lab. Co-principal investigators will be Captain Fred Bronaugh of Marine Safety and Victor Calabretta, senior vice president of operations at Maguire.
The study aims to statistically quantify peak maritime activity on the southern part of the bay. The data will then be correlated to bay shipping activity to determine issues of compatibility and coexistence. The initial catalysts for the study were the proposals for container shipping and LNG shipping on the bay, and, more recently, for efforts focused on homeland security.
According to Bronaugh, Marine Safety plans to incorporate the data from the research into its simulations and then study actual encounters between ships and recreational vessels. “This data will allow us to model reaction times to potential homeland security threats,” he added in a news release.
“We anticipate application of this data to other security activity on the bay as well,” said Calabretta. “For example, one of our study areas is immediately north of the Pell Bridge. The real-time activity data could be valuable to the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority in its security studies and emergency plans. The Narragansett Bay Yacht Racing Association’s south bay racing chart shows many race courses that cross the navigation channel and go under the bridge. Using Marine Safety’s bridge simulator, we will be able to establish an actual racing scenario as it appears from the bridge of a ship, then test reaction times related to safety.”
“This research and technology transfer will dovetail very well with a companion study currently under way in the upper bay,” said Oviatt. That study, titled “Narragansett Bay Scope, an Examination of Human Interaction with the Marine Environment,” is being conducted by URI’s Department of Marine Affairs under the Sea Grant Program. The results of these two studies aim to provide a comprehensive definition of human activities on the bay.
Marine Safety International, based in New York, is a subsidiary of FlightSafety International, a Berkshire Hathaway company.