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GCN Home > 05/2/05 issue

On the beach

By Trudy Walsh, GCN Staff

Frazer leads a monitoring system that combines life saving with data sharing

One day, a woman wearing a back brace walked up to Mike Frazer’s lifeguard tower.

“Are you Mike Frazer?” she asked.

He said he was.

Crying, she gave him a hug and said he had rescued her years ago when she had been trapped under a pier piling during a storm. She had been motivated throughout her rehabilitation by the thought that one day she would be able to thank him in person.

Such is a day in the life of Frazer, chief lifeguard for the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Frazer has rescued more than 500 people since 1980.

For years, Frazer has used his training and skills as a champion swimmer to save lives. Now, as chief lifeguard, he uses technology as yet another life-saving tool.

Coastal view

Frazer spearheads the Los Angeles County Coast Monitoring Network, which includes 20 remote cameras, weather stations and water thermometers installed along the county’s 72-mile coastline. In 2001, the project won a national competition for a Technology Opportunities Program grant from the Commerce Department.

The network allows lifeguard captains to more effectively deploy resources on the beach. For example, a quick check of a camera at headquarters could indicate that a school group has shown up at an unguarded remote beach. A lifeguard would be dispatched to the beach immediately.

The network uses 20 Panasonic WV-CS854 dome cameras inside clear weatherproof housings. Each camera links to a Panasonic WJ-NT104 Ethernet interface unit.

Besides keeping a lookout for swimmers and beach-goers, the cameras also keep a visual time-lapse record of coastal erosion and storm drain emissions. This data is shared with the Army Corps of Engineers, the California Coastal Commission, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Weather Service.

Sharing the network’s data among the different government agencies and academic groups has been surprisingly easy, Frazer said. “There wasn’t any jurisdictional friction at all. Each time we met with another agency, new opportunities opened up. Now we’re inundated with people who want to participate in the program.”

The network has freed up resources in unexpected ways. For example, NWS used to rely on the lifeguards to provide weather and ocean data. “The lifeguards would put thermometers in the water and eyeball the surf size,” Frazer said. “Now the NWS doesn’t have to call us anymore. They can get the surf size, swell direction, water temperature, everything they need from the network. It’s all automated.”

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