this post was submitted on 17 May 2025
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Not related to NOAA, but the Coast Guard has announced plans to dismantle massive numbers of navigational buoys. In many cases, these buoys mark reefs and schoals that were causes of massive numbers of shipwrecks in the 18th and 19th centuries. Before the buoys existed.
The estimated savings from this is 40 million in total. The average Coast Guard rescue costs the government something like 20 thousand per. You can work out the math on the breakeven in terms of how many extra rescues.
It feels like we're regressing just for the sake of regressing. Throwing out the received wisdom of hundreds of years of practical experience navigating the high seas. Only because it's not new and shiny.
My guess is that GPS has removed the need for most of these buoys. When any boat can tell it's location within a few meters, and satellite maps are also easily available, avoiding shoals and reefs should be possible without buoys.
The problem is that they're removing analogue redundancies. Sure gps can tell them where they are and where to go, but what if that computer breaks down at sea, or something happens to the service and they can get an accurate update in a meaningful amount of time? When things break, we can always fall back on the redundancy in place, but when those are removed, then sailors are SOL when something stops working.
Buy a gold Trump Sextant to own the libs!