MAY 20, 2024 — The NOAA Marine Debris Program Chief Scientist, Amy V. Uhrin, attended the first meeting of the Social Cost of Plastic Pollution Working Group of the National Center for Environmental Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS).
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March 2014
Ken Finkelstein sponsored and organized the tenth winter meeting of the NOAA New England working group. This biannual meeting is held all over New England with the recent meeting held in Boston, MA at the U.S. EPA Regional Office on March 11, 2014.
On March 4, 2014, the Maine and New Hampshire Area Committee held its 17th annual “Oil Spill Response Seminar.” This year’s topic was “Responding to Submerged Oils.” OR&R’s Emergency Response Division has been a key participant and contributor to these seminars both as a member of the Design Team and as a presenter.
OR&R Outreach is offering Crisis and Risk Communication (CERC) training to take place on April 2, 2014 in NOAA Building 9 on the Seattle/Sand Point campus. The training will be held from 8:45 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. It is free to all participants (not limited to OR&R) and is open to any NOAA staff in Seattle that day. First developed in 2002 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CERC training is a fast-paced, interactive course that gives participants essential knowledge and tools to navigate the harsh realities of communicating to the public, media, partners and stakeholders during an emergency.
Last weekend, Jason Rolfe, the NOAA Marine Debris Program Southeast and Caribbean Regional Coordinator, took part in a panel discussion and provided insight on the award-winning documentary, Into the Gyre about plastic pollution in the North Atlantic Ocean following the public screening at the Jekyll Island Convention Center on Jekyll Island, Georgia.
During the week of March 10, OR&R provided a Science of Oil Spills (SOS) Class to 45 emergency response and natural resource professionals from the region, nationally, including one student from the Canadian Coast Guard at the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) Disaster Response Center. (We had 124 applicants for the class and were only able to accommodate 45, which still is a larger than normal class.)
The North Atlantic chapter of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) is sponsoring a two-day short course on Natural Resource Damage Assessments (NRDAs) on June 10-11 at University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
On March 24, 2014, we hosted a Twitter Q&A with NOAA marine biologist Gary Shigenaka on the environmental impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which happened 25 years earlier in Prince William Sound, Alaska.
A virtual table-top exercise between the U.S. Coast Guard, Cuba, Mexico and the Bahamas will occur on March 12, 12014.
This week NOAA's Disaster Response Center hosted more than 40 state and federal responders for the Emergency Response Division's Science of Oil Spills class.
Congratulations to the winners of the 2014 "Keep the Sea Free of Debris!" art contest.
The OR&R Emergency Response Division is pleased to announce the release of an updated version of IncidentNews.
The U.S. Coast Guard coordinated a three-day summit hosted by and held at the National Marine Fisheries Southeast Regional Office in St. Petersburg, Florida, on February 25-27, 2014.