URI assisted with crucial El Faro discovery
By News Staff
URI’s Inner Space Center provided technology that helped lead to the discovery of El Faro’s “black box”, which could reveal why the cargo ship sank off the Bahamas in a hurricane last fall.
The Inner Space Center at the Graduate School of Oceanography provided telepresence technology to assist with the search. Dwight Coleman, the center’s director, worked with the National Transportation Safety Board and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to install the technology on the Atlantis research vessel, which is the Woods Hole ship that conducted the search.
“Finding an object about the size of a basketball almost 3 miles under the surface of the sea is a remarkable achievement,” said NTSB Chairman Christopher A. Hart. “It would not have been possible without the information gained during the first survey of the wreckage and the equipment and support provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, the University of Rhode Island, and the many other partners involved in this effort.”
According to Coleman, the technology “helped provide critical clues to investigators to determine why the El Faro sank. There’s some mystery as to what happened, so finding the voyage data recorder could reveal key details about the critical moments before the sinking.’’
All 33 crew members aboard the El Faro died, making it one of the worst disasters involving an American cargo vessel in decades.
The ship was found a month later in nearly 15,000 feet of water, but the “black box” which recorded data on the voyage was never located.
Video has shown that the navigation bridge and two upper decks, had separated from the El Faro’s hull and were about a half mile away on the ocean floor.
Earlier this month, Coleman installed ship-to-shore telecommunications equipment on the Atlantis to allow high-definition video broadcasts to stream ashore.
The data should have recorded audio from the bridge and information about the ship’s speed and course.
© WLNE-TV 2016
