Responding to Disasters

I feel very fortunate that all the major jobs I have held in my life have been for organizations with the goal of somehow improving quality of life or environment (even BLRRFH, for those of you who unfortunately remember those days).

I worked for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) for almost seven years before my move to NGCP. In my final months with OR&R, I had the opportunity to work on a number of very cool projects.

When an oil spill occurs in coastal waters, the U.S. Coast Guard and OR&R respond on-scene. OR&R provides the Coast Guard with information about tides and weather (so they can predict where the oil will go), oil chemistry, sensitive ecological habitats that might be nearby, and effective cleanup methods. The National Weather Service provides OR&R with the weather forecasts during a spill event.

For instance, in February 1999, the New Carissa grounded off the coast of Oregon during a winter storm. Emergency responders decided the best way to keep the oil on board from spilling into the water and damaging the sensitive coastal Oregon habitat was to burn it aboard the ship - to conduct in-situ burning as it's called. Because fire inevitably releases a great amount of smoke and air pollution, it was crucial for the responders to know the weather forecast so they could burn the oil when winds were blowing away from shore, otherwise there would be dangerous levels of air pollution blowing into the nearby Oregon towns.

So what I did while at OR&R was work with our fantastic graphic designer, an oil spill response guru, and a two National Weather Service meteorologists to create an articulated educational slide show about the collaboration between the National Weather Service and OR&R during oil spill response events. I wrote the slide text and script for the slide show and helped choose dramatic photos and research events to demonstrate the effective collaboration.

The slide show, "Responding to Disasters," is now available online at http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/sew/DisasterResponse/player.html. The National Weather Service Web site is one of the top-ten visited sites in the country, so it is pretty exciting that something I worked hard to help produce is available there. Take a look and listen if you have some time. If nothing else, check out some of the photos - they are incredible!

Another project I worked on was editing text and writing the executive summary for a Congressional committee report on marine debris. So some Congressmen and women will potentially be reading my writing. My writing may even influence Congressional policy and decision-making related to marine debris. Pretty dang cool.

All the photos included in this post were taken by NOAA and are included in the NOAA slide show.