Crossing My Desk...: 2018

ALCOAST 350/18
COMDTNOTE 5700
SUBJ: 40TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LOSS OF USCGC CUYAHOGA
1. Saturday, October 20th, marks the 40th anniversary of USCGC CUYAHOGA (WIX 157)
sinking. The cutter was underway in the Chesapeake Bay near the mouth of the
Potomac River on a nighttime training mission when she collided with the 521-foot
Argentine-flagged freighter M/V SANTA CRUZ II. The impact of the collision was so
devastating that CUYAHOGA sank in minutes, taking 10 Coast Guardsmen and an
international officer with her. Eighteen crewmembers survived the incident.
2. The CUYAHOGA sinking – and the USCGC BLACKTHORN (WLB 391) collision and sinking
15 months later - initiated a period of review and reflection that ultimately led
to improvements in Cost Guard policy, doctrine, training and standardization. The
Service created a preparation course for all command cadre, mandated the Deck Watch
Officer Examination, required prospective commanding officers to conduct underway
familiarization rides, and promulgated the Commandant's Cutter Navigation Standards.
Today, Service leaders at all levels are trained to mitigate risk and ensure that
Coast Guard operations are performed as safely as possible. We honor the sacrifice
of those Coast Guardsmen who perished aboard CUYAHOGA 40 years ago by adhering to
the lessons learned from that tragedy.
3. Two ceremonies will be held to memorialize the CUYAHOGA and her crew. On Friday,
October 19, Officer Candidate School will host a ceremony on the campus of the
Coast Guard Academy. For further information, please contact LT Eric Romero at
(860) 701-6402 or "Eric.D.Romero@uscg.mil." On Saturday, October 20, a ceremony
including members of CUYAHOGA's surviving crew, will take place on the grounds of
Training Center Yorktown. For more information, please contact CWO4 Chad McNeill at
(757) 856-2241, "Chad.A.McNeill@uscg.mil"; or LT Brendan Salerno at (757) 856-2720,
"Brendan.R.Salerno@uscg.mil."
4. More information about USCGC CUYAHOGA is available at:
"https://history.uscg.afpims.mil/cmsmedia/2002048161/-1/-1/0/CUYAHOGA%20AFPIMS.PDF"
5. Please pause to remember our lost shipmates of USCGC CUYAHOGA and reflect on
their service to our nation.
6. RDML Melissa Bert, USCG, Director of Governmental & Public Affairs, sends.
7. Internet release is authorized.

Monday, October 8, 2018

Map of Any City

Friday, October 5, 2018

How the Washington & Old Dominion railroad created Northern Virginia’s suburbs

https://ggwash.org/view/amp/69306

Saturday, September 29, 2018

TEQUILA AND U.S.-MEXICAN SECURITY RELATIONS

https://warontherocks.com/2018/09/tequila-and-u-s-mexican-security-relations/

Tuesday, September 25, 2018

How Maps Show the Evolution of Airlines

https://thepointsguy.com/news/how-maps-show-the-evolution-of-airlines/

Sunday, September 16, 2018

The End of the Fighting General

As appropriate, can apply more broadly.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/09/12/the-end-of-the-fighting-general

Monday, September 3, 2018

Lonely Planet adopts What3words geocoded addresses to find places using just 3 words

https://venturebeat.com/2018/07/16/lonely-planet-adopts-what3words-geocoded-navigation-system-to-find-places-using-just-3-words/

Saturday, September 1, 2018

How America Killed Transit

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/how-america-killed-transit/ar-BBMIgKn?li=BBnbfcL#image=BBMIgKn_0|7

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

A New Trick to Keep Barnacles From Sticking to Ships - The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/27/science/barnacles-ships-coating.html

H/T CS

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

The Panama Buoy

http://coastguard.dodlive.mil/2018/08/the-panama-buoy/

Friday, August 24, 2018

What a Crippling Cyber Attack Looks Like

The entire Wired article is well worth the read here. This sequence may seem somewhat familiar to any of us who have had to coordinate repair part deliveries to those deployed...

"After a frantic search that entailed calling hundreds of IT admins in data centers around the world, Maersk’s desperate administrators finally found one lone surviving domain controller in a remote office—in Ghana. At some point before NotPetya struck, a blackout had knocked the Ghanaian machine offline, and the computer remained disconnected from the network. It thus contained the singular known copy of the company’s domain controller data left untouched by the malware—all thanks to a power outage. “There were a lot of joyous whoops in the office when we found it,” a Maersk administrator says.

When the tense engineers in Maidenhead set up a connection to the Ghana office, however, they found its bandwidth was so thin that it would take days to transmit the several-hundred-gigabyte domain controller backup to the UK. Their next idea: put a Ghanaian staffer on the next plane to London. But none of the West African office’s employees had a British visa.

So the Maidenhead operation arranged for a kind of relay race: One staffer from the Ghana office flew to Nigeria to meet another Maersk employee in the airport to hand off the very precious hard drive. That staffer then boarded the six-and-a-half-hour flight to Heathrow, carrying the keystone of Maersk’s entire recovery process."