Kilroy is here.

At 12:30 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, staff from the Ocean Research and Conservation Association and volunteers completed installation of a remote-controlled water quality sensor, known as a “Kilroy,” on a post in about 6 feet of water on the south side of the inlet.

At 12:49 p.m. Wednesday, Kilroy started sending information about water speed, direction, temperature, salinity and the prevalence of key microorganisms to ORCA’s Fort Pierce office.

With sensors in a plastic case in the water and a solar power unit perched above, the device is called Kilroy because ORCA officials hope that one day it will be as ubiquitous in coastal waters around the world as its cartoon namesake was in the European Theater during World War II.

It could happen: The Kilroy installed Wednesday is the first of 25 ORCA plans to deploy over the next few weeks — weather permitting — between the St. Lucie Inlet near Stuart to the Fort Pierce Inlet near Fort Pierce. Later this year, a second network of Kilroys is scheduled to be deployed in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the United States and the country’s most imperiled marine ecosystem.

Edith A. “Edie” Widder, president and senior scientist at ORCA, said the “network” of Kilroys is the key to the devices’ primary goal: determining the sources of and damages from pollution in coastal waters.

“It’s critical to know water flow patterns in order to figure out where pollution is coming from and where it’s going,” Widder said.

Kilroys, she added, provide real-time data not available by the current method of taking periodic water samples by hand.

For now the Kilroys can’t provide immediate analysis of pollutants in the water, Widder noted, but they can be told by remote control to take and hold water samples.

“Most pollution events occur during bad weather when you’re not going to be out taking samples,” she said, but a sample taken by a Kilroy when its sensors indicate turbidity in the water can be collected for analysis in a lab.

“This is a really important step in the long-term health of the (Indian River) lagoon,” George Jones, the Indian Riverkeeper, said as the Kilroy was installed. “Being able to track where water and nutrients in it are coming from is essential.”

Widder said once Kilroys are manufactured commercially, a 10-unit network should cost about $50,000.

By Tyler Treadway, TCPalm.com

Tags: critical, hand, Health, imported, informant, speeding, St. Lucie Inlet, volunteer, volunteers, Weather

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 11:22 am and is filed under Fort Pierce, Martin County, State, Stuart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.