NOAA's Gulf of Mexico Disaster Response Center (DRC) brings together NOAA-wide resources to improve preparedness, planning, and response capacity for natural and man-made disasters along the Gulf Coast. Located in Mobile, Alabama, the center is focused on the five states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. The facility is designed to survive up to Category 5 hurricane winds, contains a Force-5 tornado shelter, and has backup power systems to continue operations in the midst of severe weather. Intended to serve as a safe and ready command center during major disaster responses in the Gulf, the DRC also offers facilities for drills, training, workshops, and planning activities.

The Office of Response and Restoration's Assessment and Restoration Division (ARD) is responsible for evaluating and restoring coastal and estuarine habitats damaged by hazardous waste releases, oil spills, and vessel groundings.

Working with partners, ARD, through NOAA's Damage Assessment, Remediation, and Restoration Program, determines the harm to the environment and defines the amount of restoration required to compensate the American public for those impacts.

The NOAA Marine Debris Program (MDP) partnered with NOAA's Coral Reef Ecosystem Division and Office of National Marine Sanctuaries to fund a 33-day mission to remove marine debris from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. A total of 17 NOAA divers and crew members, including MDP staff, sailed aboard the NOAA Ship Oscar Elton Sette and removed debris from Hawaii's Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, a World Heritage Site and one of the largest marine conservation areas in the world.

In total, the team removed approximately 57 tons of derelict fishing nets and plastic debris from the monument's tiny islands and atolls, sensitive coral reefs, and shallow waters. NOAA has led this mission every year since 1996, removing a total of 904 tons of marine debris, including this year's haul.

On July 2, 2015, BP reached an agreement in principle with the United States and the five Gulf states to settle the civil claims against the company arising out of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill tragedy. Although the terms are not final or binding until a consent decree is negotiated, undergoes public comment, and secures court approval, BP has announced the value of the settlement to be approximately $20.8 billion. Of this proposed settlement up to $8.8 billion will go to natural resource damages and fund Gulf restoration projects as designated by the trustees. The agreement in principle led to the October 2015 release of the draft comprehensive restoration plan for the Gulf of Mexico. The draft plan would allocate funds to meet five restoration goals and 13 restoration types designed to meet these goals. Together, these efforts will restore wildlife and habitat and increase recreational opportunities in the Gulf. Scientific data for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill can be accessed on our public data warehouse and query tool DIVER Explorer, as well as our online mapping tool ERMA^® Deepwater Gulf Response.

In concert with National Ocean Service (NOS) priorities, we collaborated with other NOS offices and the NOAA Homeland Security Program Office to execute a one-day exercise in emergency preparedness. The primary goal of this drill was to improve NOS response, recovery, and resilience capabilities during disasters. This exercise simulated a small-scale tsunami wave inundating the East Coast, which resulted from a major landslide in the Canary Islands off Africa. Staff participated from offices in Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. Nearly 60 staff worked through critical logistical, planning, and operational issues during this hypothetical disaster.

Field staff provided real-time situational reports to the NOS incident management team using our online environmental mapping tool, ERMA^®, to create an accessible, central location for incident data. NOAA's communications team even simulated a press conference. NOAA's incident management team has continued training, with our Disaster Response Center taking a lead role in determining and implementing training requirements, as well as a NOAA incident management handbook and course.

In May 2015, we released a flexible new data management tool, known as DIVER, to the public. We developed DIVER to support the Natural Resource Damage Assessment for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. DIVER, which is a digital data warehouse and query tool, provides unprecedented flexibility for filtering and downloading environmental data collected as part of the damage assessment efforts for the Gulf of Mexico. DIVER has served as the centralized data repository for scientists from many different organizations across the country to upload their field data, analyses, results, photographs, and other key information from scientific studies. The DIVER application integrates diverse data sets and related information into the data warehouse, and the web-based DIVER Explorer query tool provides unique filtering and exporting from this vast data set. Publicly accessible data include more than 13 million records from 100,000 environmental samples collected during 20,000 field trips over the more than five year injury assessment. DIVER is available at https://www.diver.orr.noaa.gov/deepwater-horizon-nrda-data/.

We now offer our highly in-demand Science of Oil Spills (SOS) class five times a year, educating 194 responders annually. In addition, we have developed a similar course focused on the science of chemical releases. In June, we presented a pilot version of this course at our Disaster Response Center in Mobile, Alabama. The new course is designed to provide information and tools to better manage and plan for responses to chemical incidents.

We also trained 380 responders in Shoreline Cleanup and Assessment Technique (SCAT). A critical component for effective oil spill response, SCAT drives operational decisions and deployment of assets during the response. In addition, we reached 261 responders through our online training, created in partnership with The COMET^® Program, covering aerial observation of oil on water.

Internationally, we taught our Australian counterparts to use our oil weathering model, ADIOS; trained personnel from the Panama Canal Authority in the use of our chemical response (CAMEO) and oil trajectory (GNOME) software; and helped organize the 2015 Monitoring and Reporting of Illicit Discharges in the ROPME Sea Area Workshop in Dubai.

The first step in planning and preparing for potential disasters is to conduct a threat analysis to determine where and what risks exist. We undertook the Gulf of Mexico Coastal All-Hazards Risk and Threat Assessment to provide a detailed assessment of plausible risk to the coastal states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. This assessment may be useful for emergency professionals pursuing regional preparedness planning.

The assessment investigated how threats from natural and man-made infrastructure, such as oil production or chemical manufacturing facilities, overlap to augment environmental risk during potential hazards. The spectrum of hazards evaluated for this project included natural disasters (hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunami waves), pollution accidents (oil or chemical spills), and potential biological events (harmful algal blooms). The study area was comprised of 73 counties and parishes throughout Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. The final product is an assessment report with maps linking to a GIS viewer, including our online environmental data mapping tool ERMA^®, and is intended for regional contingency planners.