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The $7,000 recommendation, which would be paid for privately with no cost to the town, calls for three cameras to be stationed at the Darien Boat Club and three cameras at the Noroton Yacht Club. The six cameras would be linked to a dedicated website to allow people with access to see what’s going on in the harbor.
According to Bell, the cameras would only pick up activity in the water and would not infringe on the privacy of the two clubs or residents in the area.
“These cameras would help us monitor the harbor during storms,” Bell said Monday night during a meeting of the Darien Board of Selectmen. “We’ve had several boats that broke free of their moorings during our recent storms, and we had no way of knowing which boats were damaged.”
Boat clubs and municipalities along Long Island Sound have similar video systems, Bell said, which can capture events live in real time. The system Darien is considering would record 48 hours at a time and then automatically transfer that footage to a cloud-based computer storage set up so the data is not lost or recorded over.
“This system would give people the ability to pan and zoom from the website,” Bell said. Such online systems have grown in popularity in recent years, such as some that garnered widespread international attention of eaglets in nests.
To ensure that privacy is maintained, the selectmen will hold a public input session on the proposal during their April 22 meeting.
“I like the idea,” said Selectman Gerald Nielsen Jr. “I think it’s great.”
If there is no resistance to the plan and if private funding is found, the cameras could be installed by the end of the summer, Bell said.
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