11 AUGUST 2026 its members in the pilot house on passenger vessels, barges and tugs so they could understand what the captains see and how limited visibility can be; these engagements also allowed the crews to talk about the maneuverability and constraints of their vessels. We also got those captains to go to the rowers and sit in kayak so they could understand the rower and paddlers perspective as well. That effort to share perspectives and deepen awareness of operational capabil- ities had a profound impact in helping those communities understand what to expect and how to behave around one another in the waterway. The Chicago River is home to a large number of well, and not-so-well, organized businesses that run tour-guided kayak events. We also have a very large unguided, self-op- erated community of independent kayakers. The contrast between the two is great. The tour-guided folks get some training in safety procedures. The city is investing in the river walk and river access, so there will be more personal launch points. The second group, the unguided kayakers, we are very concerned with; they have little training and ex- perience with the informal lanes and protocols. Our HSC worked to get together the human powered craft commu- nity and the passenger vessel community to share concerns and perspectives. In the beginning of this surge of paddlers, our passenger vessel community wasn’t tracking that there were two different groups of kayakers. The HSC helped us to recognize the two different communities, and what they can expect from their knowledge base. Thus, we could iden- tify potentially untrained paddlers, which signaled to us the need to be more prepared for the unexpected. EMERGENCY SCENARIOS At the Chicago HSC, we recognize we occupy a unique niche within the community that allows us to contribute to port preparedness and resilience for recovery from a ma- jor incident. To that end, we have led or participated in sev- eral local field training exercises to bring our broad-based stakeholder networks together to address emergency sce- narios. This started in 2022 with our first exercise focused
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