The tragedy of TWA flight 800, which crashed off Long Island in July, showcased many aspects of a massive recovery effort. Images of hard-helmeted deep-sea divers, stone-faced FBI agents and concerned safety investigators competed with the pained image of relatives' grief plastered across the television news.
But a lot of behind-the-scenes work goes into such a recovery, a critical step for investigators and for protecting the public on the shore. And Cornell's outreach played a key role.
The New York Sea Grant Institute, a joint program of Cornell and the State University of New York, was asked if it could help determine where pieces of the shattered wreckage might wash ashore, based on knowledge of water and wind movement around Long Island.
"I basically provided estimates of the probable location and path of floating material several times a day," said Jay Tanski, Sea Grant coastal processes and facilities specialist based at SUNY-Stony Brook.
TWA flight 800 mysteriously exploded out of the sky off the Long Island coast on the evening of July 17, killing all 230 people aboard.
The next morning, Sea Grant received a call from Dominic Jacangelo, assistant commissioner of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, asking for help in deciding where to station crews to recover wreckage that they thought would wash up on state park beaches during the busy summer period.
Tanski remembered a U.S. Coast Guard study that he had in his files from the early 1980s that modeled water movement off Long Island. "The results of that model told us the surface flow in that area could be predicted by looking at local winds and that surface waters would be moving at a velocity equaling about 3 percent of wind speeds, and in generally the same direction."
Using that as a simple, first estimate, he accessed the Internet for data from a buoy in the ocean, maintained by the National Buoy Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the vicinity of the crash site, that gave hourly measurements of wind speed and direction.
Tanski quickly took the information and began plotting a trajectory for the TWA debris.
"What it showed was that from the time the plane went down, the movement would be toward shore, but toward the east, not the west, where they had deployed most of their people," he said.
The Parks Department had staff at some of the big state park beaches, such as Jones Beach until Tanski advised them otherwise. At the same time, Tanski fed the data to the SUNY-Stony Brook Waste Management Institute, which used it to independently track the debris path and keep the Beach Information Network (a collection of regional and local agencies involved with managing the beaches) apprised of events.
The result: Tanski's estimates were correct. "They found material on the shore within two hours of when the predictions suggested it would wash up and within the area the model had predicted. This was around the West Hampton area, farther east than the Parks people were originally thinking," he said.
"How much of it was accuracy of our model and how much of it was luck, I don't know," Tanski said. "I think we gave them a better idea of the probability of wreckage coming ashore in a different area. It definitely was not in the state parks area, where they were originally deployed."
He added: "I was somewhat surprised at how close our predictions were to what actually happened."