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NOV. 12, 2024 — Over the past year, the NOAA Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) Disaster Preparedness Program (DPP) and the Coastal Response Research Center at the University of New Hampshire partnered with Louisiana Sea Grant to launch a series of resources to assist communities following natural disasters.
OR&R Weekly Report
The Office of Response and Restoration publishes this weekly round-up of news and information of interest to our partners, stakeholders, and team members. Click to subscribe
NOV. 12, 2024 — Staff from the NOAA Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) Assessment and Restoration Division and Emergency Response Division attended the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) North America annual conference in Fort Worth, Texas from October 20–24, 2024. Attended by more than 1,500 scientists, the conference included 1,088 presentations—21 of which were co-authored by NOAA scientists—across 184 scientific sessions.
NOV. 12, 2024 — The NOAA Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) welcomed four interns from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (UMES): Jalynn Aaron and Kayla Brown, both majoring in psychology, and Mikaela Blackwood and Amari Dupree, both majoring in biology. From this November 2024 through April 2025, interns will remotely support OR&R’s Assessment and Restoration Division with work on natural resource damage assessment and restoration.
February 2021
February 8, 2021 — After the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, field teams collected tens of thousands of samples to analyze for oil constituents as part of a natural resource damage assessment. Care was exercised to avoid cross-contamination by cleaning equipment between samples.
February 8, 2021 — On February 3 members of OR&R's Disaster Preparedness Program (DPP) and the Marine Debris Program's (MDP) Response Goal Team met to discuss marine debris issues in post-disaster long term recovery.
January 2021
February 1, 2021 — On January 28, 2021 The U.S. Department of Justice proposed a $48.4 million settlement to partially fund natural resource restoration in Superfund sites along Seattle’s Lower Duwamish River at the Harbor Island, Lower Duwamish, and Lockheed West hazardous waste sites.
February 1, 2021 — An upcoming virtual international response exercise will help improve U.S. and international preparedness for major spills in the Arctic.
February 1, 2021 — On January 28, Charles Grisafi, Southeast Regional Preparedness Coordinator, represented OR&R’s Disaster Preparedness Program (DPP) as a guest speaker at a NOAA Great Lakes Regional Collaboration Team meeting.
February 1, 2021 — On January 15th, the Scripps-Rady Ocean Plastic Pollution Challenge kicked off its 6-month accelerator program focused on identifying effective, evidence-based approaches to curb the flow of plastic into the California Coast.
February 1, 2021 — On January 20, the NOAA Marine Debris Program’s (MDP) Pacific Island Regional Coordinator, Mark Manuel, provided a virtual presentation to the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo (UH-Hilo) Marine Debris in the Pacific senior-undergraduate course.
JANUARY 25, 2021 — On January 6 and 13, NOAA’s Marine Debris Program hosted a virtual two-part New Jersey Marine Debris Emergency Response Planning workshop as part of an ongoing project to help improve the preparedness of coastal states in their response to and recovery from acute marine debris incidents.
JANUARY 25, 2021 — Over the past 2 weeks, the Arctic Council's Emergency Prevention Preparedness and Response (EPPR) Working Group held its winter meeting online. EPPR includes expert working groups on oil pollution, search and rescue, radiation emergencies, and wildfires. Normally the members meet in person, but due to the health emergency restrictions and circumpolar time zones, the meetings were held remotely for a few hours each day.
JANUARY 25, 2021 — It was a blustery, overcast morning on August 28, 2017 when Adam Davis, then a young Scientific Support Coordinator, showed up on scene in Port Arthur, Texas. Wide-eyed and excited Adam could not wait to get started assisting the Marine Safety Unit, that was until he saw the flooding. Freeways and city streets completely submerged underwater.
JANUARY 25, 2021 — On January 16, the Marine Pollution Bulletin published a Viewpoint article written by the Marine Debris Program.
JANUARY 19, 2021 — Per a Federal Register Notice on January 14, 2021, the Department of Justice announced that a consent decree was lodged in the hazardous waste case of DuPont Beaumont in Jefferson County, Texas.
JANUARY 19, 2021 — On January 13, OR&R’s Disaster Preparedness Program (DPP) hosted the first National Ocean Service (NOS) Incident Management Team (IMT) meeting of 2021.
JANUARY 19, 2021 — As with most coastal states, abandoned and derelict vessels (ADV) has become a major problem in our waterways. In most cases, these ADVs, are commonly abandoned, often in disrepair and without ownership.
JANUARY 19, 2021 — On January 8, the NOAA Marine Debris Program’s (MDP) Mid-Atlantic Regional Coordinator, Christy Kehoe, provided a virtual presentation and Q+A session more than 150 fifth grade students and staff from Spring Hill Elementary School in Virginia.
JANUARY 11, 2021 — On January 6, the OR&R director, Scott Lundgren, along with staff from OR&R headquarters, Marine Debris Program, Emergency Response Division, and the Coastal Response Research Center provided a briefing for the new director of the National Weather Service Ocean Prediction Center as well as senior and interested staff from the Center.
JANUARY 11, 2021 — A study led by OR&R’s Assessment and Restoration Division's Ken Finkelstein and NOAA’s National Center for Coastal Ocean Sciences Ed Wirth, titled “Acute PCB Benthic Invertebrate Toxicity Testing to Support the 2017 Chronic Dose-Response Sediment Injury Model” has been published online in the Journal of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.
JANUARY 11, 2021 — A recent Feature Story on the NOAA Fisheries website focused on the use of the DIVER application to support clean-up and habitat restoration in the St. Louis River in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
JANUARY 4, 2021 — On December 16, the Marine Debris Program’s Monitoring Coordinator, Hillary Burgess, presented on the Marine Debris Monitoring and Assessment Project to participants of the United Nations Environment Programme Workshop: Understanding the Contributions of Citizen Science to Plastic Pollution Monitoring through the SDG Framework.
December 2020
DECEMBER 21, 2020 — The OR&R Disaster Preparedness Program (DPP) is excited to announce the recipients of the second annual Preparedness Lagniappe Awards. Funds were made available to National Ocean Service (NOS) program offices to fill preparedness gaps or innovate their current preparedness efforts.
DECEMBER 21, 2020 — In mid-December, the Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) CAMEO® team released CAMEO Data Manager, a desktop program for managing data about chemicals stored or transported in communities, especially data required under the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA).
DECEMBER 21, 2020 — On December 15, the Interagency Marine Debris Coordinating Committee (IMDCC) held a virtual public meeting focusing on marine debris monitoring and detection.
DECEMBER 21, 2020 — On December 15, the Interagency Marine Debris Coordinating Committee (IMDCC) held a virtual public meeting focusing on marine debris monitoring and detection.
DECEMBER 21, 2020 — In August of 2019, the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) received notification of a crude oil spill in the southern Louisiana marsh (29° 28' 33" N, 089° 38' 07" W). The oil company reported a release of 20 barrels of crude oil and an unknown quantity of produced water.
DECEMBER 21, 2020 — On November 30, The University of New Hampshire (UNH) Coastal Response Research Center (CRRC) working with OR&R's Disaster Preparedness Program and Assessment and Restoration Division economists released a request for proposals for technical support to enhance our knowledge of economic valuing of preparedness, specifically in coastal disasters.
DECEMBER 14, 2020 — Prior to 2020, the majority of the OR&R training was conducted in-person at venues throughout the country.
DECEMBER 14, 2020 — On Wednesday, December 9, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) SciTech Forum hosted a complimentary webinar weeks before the 2021 main event that addressed current impacts to the commercial aviation industry.
DECEMBER 14, 2020 — On December 7 and 8, Andrew Mason, Pacific Northwest Regional Coordinator of the Marine Debris Program (MDP), along with support from multiple members from both the Atlantic and Pacific MDP Teams, hosted an all-virtual workshop to allow stakeholders and community members to update the existing Washington Marine Debris Action Plan created in 2018.
DECEMBER 14, 2020 — On December 7, Nancy Wallace, Director of the Marine Debris Program (MDP), presented at NASA’s Goddard Engineering Colloquium Series on the topic of remote sensing technologies for detection of marine debris.