16 to come in,” said Jared Scott, GIS program manager in the Baltimore District of the US Army Corps of Engineers. “When someone had a question or tapped me on the shoulder because they had a dataset, we had answers from the portal. I could show them how to use it to make their data visible to whoever needed it.” NOAA connected its navigation response team to conduct hydrographic surveys. “They make a product, which is traditionally a PDF map, that everyone looks at to see if there are any obstructions,” said Leland Snyder, maritime geographer with NOAA. “The hub site was that on steroids. It brought everyone together very quickly.” With a constrained channel, a new level of traffic coordination was needed. “We built some tools to manage the schedule, using automatic identification system (AIS) data to highlight where vessels were coming in and out. It allowed the patrol commander to watch the scene,” Hanna said. An additional auxiliary channel, created in less than 30 days, was designed specifically for sugar barges from the Domino Sugar Refinery, a mainstay in the Port of Baltimore for more than 100 years. The sugar was stacking up and needed to get to market to keep goods flowing and the factory running. NOAA made regular updates to navigation charts as the situation evolved.
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