No anchor drops on the island cables

Yannis is a duty officer at the port authority of Piraeus, the sea gate of Athens. Undersea cables carry power to the islands across a stretch where no ship may anchor. Waiting ships drift in at night anyway. One dragged anchor last winter cut an island’s power for four days, and nobody saw it happen. With xMap Flows, Yannis built Sentry. Every five minutes, across the waters off Piraeus, Sentry listens for every ship, spots any that entered the cable zone, keeps the ones slowing down to anchor, tells the patrol boat, and marks them on the duty map. Last Thursday at two in the morning, a tanker slowed inside the zone. Sentry warned the patrol boat within five minutes, and the ship moved off before its anchor touched the seabed. Yannis cannot watch every ship. Now he does not have to.

The story in words