app with the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund as it was the specifically designated fund for these types of information and planning purposes. And the question is why haven't those applications been made as part of the sub-area planning for all of these areas that now have tank vessel operations in the middle of winter in 42 inches of ice. You know, clearly I asked yesterday whether the hydrographic information would be gathered and utilized for designing specific salvage, lightering and spill response vessels in those areas. And there seems to be with such a large liability of the Coast Guard at stake here that it would necessarily budget hydrographic surveys and request funding from the OSLTF. And certainly where the state has very specific requests for operation of its public vessels that it also seek funding from the 470 Fund for that purpose as well.
And that's a nice lead-in to the next slide. For those of that don't know, Captain Brigham in one way or another taught me how to break ice. He taught the people who taught me how to break ice. And I owe a lot of what I know about ice and icebreaking and much of my career to Dr. Brigham. Dr. Jeffress? MEMBER JEFFRESS: Yes. I had a question about the weather. Like, how often is it clear visibility and how often is it restricted visibility going through this strait? COMMANDER HOUCK: I would have to base my answer on my own experience and I would say that only about half the time are weather conditions ideal with visibilities greater than 8 miles. The non-ideal can vary between ice coverage, fog with visibilities down to where you can't see the bow of your ship to sideways rain to 40-foot seas. So, if there are no other
intermediate places and I've worked with a lot of historical data. They aren't perfect but they're better than no data. And there are things that can be done and you can transition to a higher level and eventually sell it to NOAA kind of thing. It seems like in the complete absence of data that would be a good way to do it. If you could make a compelling case to the state that there is a need based on these disastrous storm incidents. MS. MCCAMMON: We actually put in a capital budget request this year through the Northern Waters Task Force and it didn't get funded this year but we'll try again next year. CHAIR WELLSLAGER: Joyce? MEMBER MILLER: Yes, just another question for Molly. Is ERMA and your database on common platforms or have they gone in different directions? MS. MCCAMMON: They're both open source. I'm not a techie so my level of understanding is about to here.
error, on pulse repetition rates, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Enough to give them -- this is 400-level. Enough to give them the response to it. Mid-term they would have to take all their notes, all their information and fundamentally work through a dozen questions. And I guarantee, I don't know why it takes 3 hours but graduate and undergraduate students can use 3 hours to try to answer 12 questions. Be that as it may the second half of the curriculum, because we are looking at people going to work. We want them in these companies. Was to actually give them survey planning and survey practices standards, what goes on with all of your patch tests, what goes on in length of duration of establishing tidal datums, just run them through all the practical stuff so that by the time we got to the end of the class they would understand contracting language, what is Brooks Act and IDIQ. They would be able to look at what's
CHAIR WELLSLAGER: Interesting. What would be the possibilities of -- to build on some of the things Joyce had said, if the Corps of Engineers said I want to have a port here, infrastructure was in place and the facility looked like it was a go. And keeping in mind my knowledge of the Alaskan shoreline is poor at best what would be the possibilities of bringing up a navigation response team or possibly two teams to come in and do the survey since the cost factor to try to get a ship up here to do something like that and the time involved would be prohibitively expensive. And that's a question I guess that would come to either you or Dr. Sullivan. Could something like that actually happen? I mean, we're looking at another way of getting or possibly getting it out to a contractor. CAPT. LOWELL: I would say it's probably more likely that we would go the contract route in this area. I mean, we've had
numbers it didn't really -- we couldn't justify, you know, the benefit to the project. DR. SULLIVAN: Was that because the geography -- this is Kathy Sullivan -- the geography or the ADCP or the tide gauge would have been helpful didn't fit within the -- MR. EDWING: We had some historic data that really could be used to, you know, help improve the model. Putting a tide gauge in wasn't going to buy us enough improvement to the model to justify the cost. CAPT. LOWELL: I don't know if I'm applying the wrong logic here, but if we were to think about the IOCM concept of simply understanding what the differential is could that be applicable to that? Obviously the cost associated with a new tide gauge to the single project you were working with was not cost-effective but perhaps if other users weighed in on other requirements could be met based on that. Is there a coordinated way to do