| “It’s a lot better to get to know your partners before an incident so you can work effectively together during an incident.” | |
| Charlie Henry, NOAA’s Gulf of Mexico Disaster Response Center |
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Sandy, Katrina, and the Deepwater Horizon—it’s clear the nation’s coasts are at risk from hurricanes, oil spills, and other natural and technological hazards. Coastal resource managers in the Gulf of Mexico are taking steps to ensure that next time they are better prepared—and what they are creating may be a template that can be used around the country.
The five Gulf Coast national estuarine research reserves, or NERRs, are all following the same process to create site-specific plans and to define appropriate actions for assisting with disaster response.
Each reserve’s disaster response planning process includes collaborating with local, state, and federal emergency managers to make them familiar with the capabilities of the reserve that may be useful during a hazardous event, including maps and data, sampling and testing capabilities, detailed knowledge of the reserve and its natural resources, and access to boats, personnel, and volunteers.
“The emergency management community traditionally has been focused on protecting private property and infrastructure. Natural resources are not something that is even thought about in a lot of cases unless there is a distinct economic impact,” says Matthew Chasse, program specialist with the NOAA Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management’s Estuarine Reserves Division. “This is something of a gap in the emergency management planning process.”
“The plans the reserves have developed will have value alone,” says Charlie Henry, director of NOAA’s Gulf of Mexico Disaster Response Center, “but I’ve always felt that the greatest value in planning is through the process of working together with key stakeholders before an incident.”
Chasse agrees. “The new relationships that were developed with the emergency managers are key to the successful implementation of these plans.”
Henry adds, “The end product will also serve as a template for NERRs around the country and other such reserves and wilderness areas.”
High Risk
Many of the nation’s reserves are located in areas at risk for a variety of technological and natural hazards, such as oil and chemical spills, vessel and plane crashes, flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, landslides, and more.
“All around our coasts, reserves are impacted by different types of natural hazards, as well as man-made hazards,” so one plan definitely does not fit all, Chasse says. “Even though reserves are relatively pristine, they typically are not in the middle of nowhere. Part of the reason reserves are where they are today is to enable public access and facilitate research and education activities on these important estuaries.”
“What’s often unknown,” Chasse says, “is the reserves have a wide array of resources to protect, and as part of their state agencies they are mandated to protect those resources for research, education, stewardship, and the long-term benefits to the surrounding communities.”
David Ruple, manager of the Grand Bay NERR in Moss Point, Mississippi, notes that NERR resources are not only protected as trust resources by the state, but are also a specifically stated NOAA trust resource under the Natural Resource Damage Assessment Process.
“One way to ensure such protections is through better planning and coordination,” Ruple says.
After experiencing a chemical spill, Hurricane Katrina, and the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill, “it just became apparent that we needed to do something to be better connected to emergency response efforts, particularly at the federal level,” Ruple says.
“One reason this came up,” says Henry, “is that the resources of the NERRs are not always reflected with such detail in area contingency planning.”
Funding Opportunity
When the Disaster Response Center announced the opportunity to apply for grant funding, Ruple stepped forward to lead the Gulf of Mexico planning effort. “There seemed to be a void in the emergency response, and we wanted to help avoid that in the future. This was the opportunity to do something about it, and that was to create formal plans.”
Ruple notes that most coastal protected areas have hurricane evacuation plans but do not have more comprehensive disaster response plans.
Taking advantage of competitive funding from NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, a grant proposal developed by Ruple was awarded to Grand Bay on behalf of the five Gulf of Mexico reserves.
The Office of Ocean and Coastal Resource Management and Grand Bay NERR coordinated getting the funding to each of the participating reserves and hired a contractor with hazard response planning experience to help facilitate the meetings with emergency managers and write each plan.
Facilitated Process
Following templates developed by the contractor, each reserve took the first step in the disaster response planning process—identifying and ranking its specific hazards risks, Henry says.
Each reserve then held a facilitated workshop with 25 to 40 local, state, and federal emergency managers where the NERR staff members learned more about the emergency response protocols for their area, shared information about their site’s environmental resources and what needed to be protected under different kinds of stressors, and ways they could respond to future disasters in a more coordinated fashion.
The reserves also shared their assets and information that could support emergency planning and response.
Henry points out the importance of the relationships that were established during the workshops. “It’s a lot better to get to know your partners before an incident so you can work effectively together during an incident.”
The contractor was expected to have the final plans for the reserves completed at the end of March.
Practice Makes Perfect
Once the plans are complete, Ruple says the reserves expect to practice them during local drills and emergency response exercises.
“We want the reserves to get active in actually exercising the elements of the plans to help reinforce the connections that were made,” Henry says.
“The number one outcome,” Ruple says, “is that emergency responders now have more information about the reserves and know what type of information we have that they can make use of.”
Chasse adds, “These plans will help the reserves be more resilient and better able to effectively respond to protecting their infrastructure and resources. They’ll be able to devote resources more strategically to areas that need it, and protect those critical areas first.”
Once the final plans are in hand, Chasse says, he hopes to begin sharing the process with reserves outside the Gulf of Mexico, starting with those in the Northeast directly impacted by Hurricane Sandy.
“People talk about how unusual Sandy is, but if you look back over the past 50 years, this was not an unusual event,” Henry says. “These kinds of events do happen, and managers need to keep the need for disaster response planning in mind.”
For more information, you may contact David Ruple at (228) 475-7047 or david.ruple@dmr.ms.gov, Matthew Chasse at (301) 563-1198 or Matt.Chasse@noaa.gov, or Charlie Henry at (251) 544-5008 or Charlie.Henry@noaa.gov.
