Congratulating Major General Tom Mullikin on A Successful Deployment of the Smart Reef Project

Floor Speech

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Mr. NORMAN. Madam Speaker, I rise today to congratulate Major General (Ret.) Tom Mullikin, PhD, JD and the SC7 Team for successful deployment of the Smart Reef Project. This project increased integrated real time environmental observations and advanced modeling supporting an array of beneficial applications. A secondary focus was on technology development to enable cost effective distributed observing.

The Smart Reef Initiative advanced numerous goals of the South Carolina Floodwater Commission recommendations: data collection to advance modeling for predicting and engineering of coastal environments to deal with issues of sea level rise and flooding; exploring the utility of artificial reefs to potentially be designed to effect coastal beach erosion while also supporting recreational fisheries; and, data collection for similar ideas of ``living shorelines'' such as oyster reef restoration projects to help mitigate marsh erosion in estuaries as well as the potential to employ further up the watershed.

The Smart Reef system adds data and facilitates real-time data feeds into the Coastal Carolina University Center's interactively coupled ocean-atmosphere-wave-hydrologic modeling system to improve the advanced model applications to help inform discussions about tropical storm impacts (e.g., flooding, and storm surge) and eventually broader pressures and threats to our coastal environmental and economies. The data also supports broad research interests related to the growing of reef system interactions with waves and currents as well as a wide range of natural resource management concerns.

The SC7 Team Expedition along with the South Carolina National Heritage Corridor, Coastal Carolina University, University of South Carolina, South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, Force Blue, Medical University of South Carolina, South Carolina Office of Resiliency, South Carolina Department of Veterans Affairs, Toadfish and other private sector partners successfully overcame rough seas to deploy the Smart Reef technology to protect the Palmetto State. A special thanks to my friend MG Tom Mullikin for his continued and tireless efforts to protect South Carolina's beautiful environment.

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