Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: 15 Years of Advancing Science

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HOST: This is the NOAA Ocean Podcast. I’m your host, Allison Burrell. April 20, 2025, marks 15 years since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill — the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. Triggered by an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform, this tragic incident claimed the lives of 11 individuals and resulted in the release of approximately 134 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of America, formerly the Gulf of Mexico. This disaster occurred on such a large scale that there are still effects on the environment today. Over the last 15 years, teams across NOAA have worked to restore the Gulf and advance oil spill science and preparedness to better support future environmental disasters. Today, we’re joined by Doug Helton and Lisa DiPinto from the National Ocean Service’s Office of Response and Restoration. Doug is the regional operations supervisor in the Emergency Response Division, and Lisa is a senior scientist. During this episode, Doug and Lisa use their insight and experience to discuss NOAA’s contributions to the Gulf response and restoration effort and advancements in technology over the past 15 years. Now, let’s dive in.

HOST: Thank you for joining us at the NOAA Ocean Podcast. I'd like to welcome our guests, Doug Helton and Lisa DiPinto. Thank you for joining us.

DIPINTO: Great to be here.

HELTON: Yeah.

HOST: So on April 20, 2025 it will have been 15 years since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. And this was a disaster on such a large scale — there are still effects on the environment today. As part of the National Ocean Service, would you highlight the role your office played in response to the 2010 oil spill?

HELTON: Our office had multiple roles. But the first one was that first night of the incident. And we are a scientific support team that gets called by the Coast Guard; and we helped to predict where the oil, that was now floating and burning, where it was going to spread to. So that was the first question. But then we had months and months and months of other questions. 

DIPINTO: And we also had a follow-up role that began almost immediately with our natural resource damage assessment to understand where the oil was going, what resources were going to be affected, in what way and what it would cost to do restoration projects to restore for those resources that were lost as a result of the spill.

HOST: That must be so difficult to mobilize all aspects of a response so quickly. How fast was NOAA’s response to the incident?

HELTON: Well, on the cleanup side, we had people mobilized right away. We had people in the command post the next morning. We had, by the end of the first day, we'd already had several products that we'd provided to the Coast Guard about what kind of oil this was, where it might be spreading, what kind of impacts it might be having. But the first day or even the first week, there's a whole lot of uncertainty. The drilling ship was still afloat, but on fire, we didn't know if there was an uncontrolled blowout. We didn't know how much oil was spreading or spilling every day. We knew it was bad, but we didn't know how bad it was going to get. And so that first day to week, there was just a huge amount of scrambling to get people on scene and to try to get some better information about what was actually happening out there.

HOST: So in addition to your office, during this Deepwater Horizon oil spill response, what collaborations occurred across all of NOAA?

HELTON: I guess I would say it was almost like an all hands on deck. Our Office of Response and Restoration is about 100 people. And I think at the peak of the response, there was close to 1,000 NOAA employees that had some level of engagement on this response. Initially we had people from the Weather Service and we had people from Charting, and we had people from Sanctuaries. We had Fisheries folks that helped with the sea turtles and the wildlife impacts. And that's just on the response side. And another big partnership was with our NESDIS program because they had satellite products that were incredibly useful. The spill was so big that you couldn't fly across it and capture the information in a single airplane flight. So we had to use satellites to even look at the footprint. And again, that's just on the response side. And I know Lisa had spent a lot of time with other experts in NOAA helping on the damage assessment. 

DIPINTO: Yeah, I think it's fair to say that we engage with pretty much every office of NOAA on this spill for periods of days to months to, for the purposes of the natural resource damage assessment, to years. So we spent six years on that assessment and engaged across NOAA with our in-house experts, as well as a lot of external experts from academia, consulting, industry, and really nationally and internationally.

HOST: Had NOAA satellites been used to evaluate oil spills in the past?

HELTON: We had experimental capacity and that experimental capacity rapidly grew into a real time. And so we could take the satellite images and bring them in and use those to initialize our daily models about where the oil is going to go over the next 24 to 48 hours. So the big question on the response side is: how soon is that oil going to come ashore, and where is it going to come ashore? So we know where to stage people and equipment to help protect those shorelines but also to start cleaning it up. 

DIPINTO: And in the aftermath of this spill, I mean, we recognized the value of using these satellite images and they went from an experimental program during Deepwater Horizon and throughout the incident, we began releasing those to the public. And now this NOAA-NESDIS Marine Pollution Surveillance Report program is kind of standard fare for observing and identifying and documenting oil spills. Smallish and large incidents. 

HOST: What are some of the most significant advancements that resulted from this Deepwater Horizon oil spill? 

DIPINTO: I think one of the big areas that we've focused on following through and developing and advancing is the area of remote sensing. Being able to detect and document, rapidly report and produce maps of where the oil on the surface is. So I feel like that field was in its early development stages at the beginning of Deepwater Horizon — once we recognized how important it was for both the response and for the natural resource damage assessment to have those images of the footprint of oil on the surface. We decided as a program to invest our resources in furthering the development and implementation of those kinds of remote sensing tools and technologies, whether it's the satellite information that we got from the NOAA-NESDIS program and doing some tests to validate and verify what we were seeing from space and actually documenting that, hey, that looks like an oil spill or an oil slick on the water and then having someone in a boat on the water, validating, verifying, measuring how thick that slick is and describing it in real time and space at the same time that the satellite is passing overhead, was one big area of advancement. But we've also expanded that into different kinds of platforms beyond satellites that are out flying around in space, but to fixed wing aircrafts or small drones. Or depending on the size of the spill, different platforms are going to be useful for smaller drones or larger spills. And we've worked with various experts across the world on different sensor packages. So what could you use to detect and see oil on the water? So whether it's just a fancy high resolution camera or is it something like a radar sensor that will allow you to “see oil through clouds,” or whether you've got a high resolution infrared sensor that can see different types of temperature changes or different features in an oil slick.

HELTON: And we mentioned the NESDIS satellite imagery that was experimental and became operational. And another major tool that was experimental and became operational was a program we call ERMA. That's our Environmental Response Management Application. And that tool helped bridge the gap between the work that was being done in the field, and the information flow to the command post and to the public. There was huge interest in making decisions and sharing information. And so this ERMA program provided a common operational picture for both the people in the command posts, and the people in the field, and the news media and the public that showed that the government really was out doing good work and trying to solve this problem. So that tool, again, was experimental during Deepwater, but as soon as it became operational, we were getting tens of thousands of hits a day of people logging in to look at the trajectory maps and the shoreline oiling and, “how close is it to their house?” And that was a huge help. And remember that 15 years ago was really sort of the Wild West of social media. And so this gave a common government-vetted information that we could share.

HOST: So, I'm curious a little bit about the oil spill thickness. Why is this so significant in an oil spill?

HELTON: Oil thickness is really the key to response. We have a term, a phrase we use called encounter rate, which is that you can only clean up oil that you can encounter. And oil thickness varies over the course of a slick. You might see a huge footprint, but 90% of the oil might be in 10% of the area. So you really need to know where that thick oil is, because that's where you want to send your booms and skimmers. And, you know, the entire footprint is, of course, important from the natural resource impacts, but from the cleanup impacts, you really want to know where the heaviest oil is. And that goes initially for oil at sea, but then later for oil on the shoreline. Again, you don't want to send people to a beach that's lightly oiled if there's heavy accumulation someplace else that are much easier to access.

DIPINTO: Yeah, and if I could just put a little context to that, we're talking about an enormous amount of data that was collected and then displayed for the public. We took over 20,000 trips out into the field to collect data across, you know, we're out 50 miles offshore. We're along many, many miles, five states worth of miles of shoreline. We had over 100,000 environmental samples that we processed and posted. And I think on the order of 13 million records that we made publicly available through this system. And, you know, you can take a look at it online. We've got a great link to ERMA and some of the data that were, well, all of the data that we made publicly available. It's all kinds of data, sediment data, water samples, tissue samples, we had reports of, you know, in addition to where the oiling was, but, you know, carcasses for protected resources that had been spotted washing ashore or seen in oil. So just, you know, the diversity of the types of data that were collected and displayed is also, I think, worth noting.

HELTON: And the connection to that previous topic about oil thickness, you know, that it's great if you can measure oil thickness, but if you can't share it rapidly with the responders and get it to the people that are actually driving the boats or flying the aircraft, then it's not very useful. So having this common operational picture was key to getting equipment and personnel in the right spots at the right time.

HOST: Is oil thickness only measured by going out on a boat and physically measuring and sampling, or can you visualize it through color or through other sensors, either through satellites or through low-flying planes?

HELTON: There are some tools, but Lisa has been doing a lot of research on improving those tools. But back in the time of the Deepwater Horizon and even earlier in the Exxon Valdez, it was all based on visual observations and the color of the oil. And the color of the oil only helps you a little bit because if it's a rainbow or silver sheen, you know, it's very, very thin, maybe kind of a molecular level thickness. Once the oil gets thicker, like the sheet of paper kind of thickness, it just appears black. So you can't tell if it's black because it's a paper thickness or if it's black because it's an inch thick. It's kind of like the analogy I used was it'd be like the paint on a house, you can tell that there's paint on a house versus stain, but you can't tell if there's five layers of paint on the house. It just looks like it's got paint on it.

HOST: That's a great analogy. What's the thickest that you measured back in Deepwater Horizon’s time?

HELTON: Well, the oil will spread rapidly. So we're still talking about, you know, only a few millimeters thickness. Once it's surfacing it’s spreading rapidly, but there are some other processes that make it thicker. So if it mixes with water and forms an emulsion, kind of like a mayonnaise or they call it chocolate mousse, it looks like an emulsion of oil and water. Those can be quite thick. And then if it’s corralled in some way, either naturally because it's come along to a shoreline or because it's been captured in a floating oil boom, then you can get it to be quite thick. And I think if you want to use some techniques like burning, for example, you need to get it to be in the couple millimeters thick just to even support ignition. So you really want to focus on concentrating that oil in thick spots to do some of those response operations. But Lisa has been doing research on how to do this more effectively using technology.

DIPINTO: Yeah, and that's part of the evolution of the satellite program. For example, they used to just report out a polygon or a shape of what the foot, total footprint of oiling was. But as we evolved in our abilities to differentiate between thin oil, medium, thickness oil, and heavy oil, sometimes, and depending on the sensor type, the program was able to produce maps that showed where the heavy oil was and where the remaining lighter footprint of oiling was. I will say from a natural resource damage assessment perspective, even thin sheens, very thin sheens down to one micron thickness, have been documented to be toxic to early life stages of fish invertebrates that are naturally buoyant, positively buoyant, floating near the surface and becoming exposed to these very thin sheens that might not be a target for the response to want to clean up. But they are important to understand the potential for having adverse impacts to our trust resources.

HOST: What are the different types of natural resources in the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill?

DIPINTO: The oil affected the entire northern Gulf ecosystem. So I would say, and we did conclude in our damage assessment that resources ranging from deep sea corals, you know, 1,000, 2,000 year old corals, to the benthic resources in the vicinity of the actual well event, and for many miles out where there was flocculent marine snow tainted with oil falling down and smothering those resources to water column resources. There's a rising cone of oil. So there are water column resources, fish and other things that are swimming in the Gulf through the oil that is dissolved and formed as droplets rising up through the water column have been affected through direct contact and through toxic exposure in the dissolved components. And then, you know, we learned that one of the more significant water column impacts was associated with that large footprint of the surface slick, which on any, you know, given day could be as high as 15,000 square kilometers. And the cumulative footprint of oiling on the surface of the Gulf was on the order of 43,000 square kilometers. So the size of the state of Virginia. So even if, as some would argue, people feel that resources could avoid the oil, that's not going to be the case in a spill as significant as this. And then when the oil reaches the shoreline and strands on the shoreline and persists for days to weeks to years, it may get buried. It may get entrained back in seagrass and spartina marshes where you've got a lot of your estuarine resources that spend a portion of their lifetime or their entire lifetimes on the shoreline. You're going to be affecting those resources as well as turtles, marine mammals. There's even a category of injury that we documented the human use of the resources that are part of the public trust resources. So really all the resources in the northern Gulf, either directly or indirectly, were likely impacted by this incident.

HELTON: And at every biological scale from the plankton up to huge cetaceans were documented to be exposed to oil and injured. So it was normally at smaller spills, sometimes the resource impacts are more subtle, but it was such a huge area that got coated with oil.

HOST: Out of all of these significant advancements created after Deepwater Horizon, are there any new technologies that can be used outside of an oil spill response?

HELTON: I think that broader environmental cleanup was improved, not just oil spills. Some of the technologies that we're working on that started as an oil spill tool are used for other kinds of environmental responses. We use ERMA as a common operational tool during hurricanes to keep track of environmental impacts there, things like stranded vessels that might be spread out over the shoreline after a hurricane.

HOST: What oil spill response tools have improved over the past 15 years?

HELTON: I would say that some of the benefits, some of the tools that we improved during Deepwater Horizon have been used around the world for other responses.

DIPINTO: I think also some of the tools and techniques we used for the assessment of our resources can be applied to other scenarios. Some of the things that we learned during Deepwater Horizon and developed for assessing our resources can be applied to a broader range of incidents beyond just this one oil spill.

HOST: What research has been generated in the wake of Deepwater Horizon? Is it still ongoing?

DIPINTO: During the Deepwater Horizon, it was probably the largest synoptic study of the Gulf that had ever happened before. And the settlement monies and the interest in this field has continued. We, at least at OR&R, have a lot of lessons learned that we've followed up on and we've initiated, kind of our own small research program, to follow up and learn more about things — like, we have an ongoing project right now evaluating how cetaceans specifically, but marine mammals or surface breathing animals more generally, are exposed to oil slicks, for example. Because one of the things we learned during the Deepwater Horizon incident is that the oil that floats on the surface, we would classically measure the exposure to marine mammals based on the volatilization of the oil. How much is evaporating into the air column and kind of base our estimates of exposure to surface breathing animals based on that. But some of the work of Joe Katz at Johns Hopkins University and others have documented that when a little bit of energy hits an oil slick through like wind or wave or raindrop action, or say a dolphin surfacing and breathing through the oil and blowing out through their blowhole and then rapidly inhaling. Imagine that through an oil slick and how much oil gets forced into the air column in the form of large droplets, large watery oily droplets, small droplets, and even tiny aerosolized particles is something that we hadn't explored very often and certainly hadn't factored into our exposures. And so now we've got some ongoing research to assess how much water droplets a dolphin produces during a breathing event without oil that we've done at the National Aquarium at Baltimore. And we've got high resolution videography documenting what they produce and then what they rapidly inhale in a breathing event. And then we've taken that into the lab at Johns Hopkins University and we are working on a mechanical structure that can essentially reproduce a dolphin breathing event in a laboratory. And then we will add oil on top of that, with and without dispersant, to be able to characterize and quantify how much is produced and how much is aspirated directly into a dolphin blowhole as an example.

HOST: Yeah, that was the first thing that I thought of when you mentioned a dolphin surfacing and going to breathe and expelling water and oil up, but then breathing it back in so they're actively breathing in this oil and there's really no way around it.

DIPINTO: Yeah, it's like aspirating droplets directly into their blowhole.

HELTON: And you could see the pictures of the marine mammals swimming in heavy oil and it just was heartbreaking.

DIPINTO: And I think and I hope that that would change the way we measure oil in the air column moving forward. And we've got another project that is looking at the air-water interface — that air column directly above a slick — to help us understand a little bit more about how that exposure occurs to other surface breathing animals.

HELTON: Another aspect of the Deepwater Horizon response was a pretty quick and aggressive human health studies. At the peak of the response there were over 50,000 people working on the cleanup. So there's been some long-term studies of those individuals, including I volunteered to be tracked by that and looking at what kind of exposure people may have had, and then not just oil exposure but also the other sorts of collateral impacts related to stress and overwork and other kinds of things that we know can cause injuries to people.

HOST: So, this is unrefined oil but still when you think of refined oil that is turned into gasoline for our cars. It evaporates very quickly. It's absorbed into your skin very, very fast. So as far as human health effects, these can be significant.

HELTON: And remember this was a pretty light oil, you know, it looks dark and black in the pictures, but in the big scheme of things this was a pretty light oil and a big fraction of it evaporated. 

DIPINTO: We did, and continue to, do a lot of research and track a lot of research that we're not conducting but, but we also do conduct some research, on the toxic effects of oil on resources. So during the damage assessment, we did toxicity tests on I think 40 different species ranging from, you know, fish and invertebrates all the way up to marine mammal cell lines, birds, turtles, et cetera. And we learned a lot about what the adverse effects associated with an organism that has been exposed to oil look like. And we learned a lot about how some of those toxic endpoints are conserved across species. So, cardiotoxic effects were observed in young life stages of fish. It affected their heart structure development. It affected their ability to swim. And we noticed that these cardiotoxic effects were also seen in other vertebrates such as birds. We noticed stress on the adrenal system from fish to marine mammals to other vertebrate species. So I think our large scale toxicity testing program has helped us understand what types of toxic effects oil has across a wide variety of species. And I think that would really shape what we look at and how we look at organisms affected by oil in the future. 

HELTON: And those impacts might be overlooked in smaller spills where there isn't as much research done, you know, it's pretty common after an oil spill to see dead birds, for example. But you don't necessarily know how many birds were exposed to sublethal levels of oiling and maybe died, they flew away and died someplace else. So Lisa's work and the team's work to look at those sublethal impacts, you're never going to see a huge fish kill, or it’s going to be rare to see a big fish kill after an oil spill, because fish that are impacted will then be consumed by something else before they have a chance to pile up on a beach somewhere. And the fish that, that might have reproductive impairments, you're not going to see that unless you do a study to look at what happens to all those year classes that would have otherwise been, you know, spawned and been healthy in the Gulf.

HOST: So all these downstream effects that you're not going to see immediately...

HELTON: Or just more subtle, you know, it's sort of like if you did an analysis of impacts of car crashes and all you did was count fatalities. You didn't count the hundreds of people that also get injured but don't die.

DIPINTO: Imagine your life as a young early life stage fish and you've got these cardiotoxic effects. You can't swim very well. I mean, a fish like that is not going to survive in the wild and grow out to be a thriving, healthy, reproducing adult fish, for example. Even if it wasn't directly killed as an acute impact of the spill, the more chronic long-term effects would lead to these not tangibly measurable effects in the immediate aftermath. 

HOST: How often does NOAA respond to hazardous events like Deepwater Horizon? Like those small spills that you were mentioning? 

HELTON: We respond to 150 to 200 incidents a year, from a scientific support helping the Coast Guard with the cleanup. And those range, they're typically smaller of hundreds to thousands of gallons of oil but might be in a sensitive area. But these detailed damage assessments are really only done on a fraction of those. So, you know, maybe for every 150 to 200 spills that NOAA responds to, probably five or 10 of them have a damage assessment response.

HOST: But these are all human-caused oil spills?

HELTON: For the most part we have responded to hurricane-generated oil spills, natural hazards, but typically they're human-derived.

HOST: What is NOAA still doing to clean up after Deepwater Horizon all these years later, 15 years later?

HELTON: I think that the cleanup is done, but the analysis of some of the data is ongoing. One of the things that we did was we had some studies looking at cleanup alternatives, and those included sort of the traditional ones of manual cleanup on the shorelines; and also using controversial topics like dispersants and burning and those, the jury's still out on some of those things. Did that help or did it hurt or was it, you know, sometimes the best thing to do in an oil spill is leave it alone and let natural recovery happen. But that has other implications, you know, for tourists and recreation and for maybe continued exposure to some of these species like birds and mammals, if you don't clean it up. So there's a lot of pressure to go clean it all up, but then sometimes that cleanup can cause more harm than good.

DIPINTO: Fortunately the natural resource damage assessment process can account for any of the adverse effects associated with the response. So, ideally your response actions are going to minimize harm to your resources, but sometimes there can be adverse effects associated with that. We don't single them out and make them their own injury category, but they are accounted for when we're trying to estimate the habitat and natural resource losses.

HOST: How does restoration of the Gulf contribute to the ocean and coastal economy? What about post-oil spill effects on tourism?

DIPINTO: Well, we've got eight billion dollars that is slated for restoration of the Gulf, not the whole amount, but a significant portion of that is slated to be spent doing restoration projects in the Gulf. So I think that money being used to enhance the resources in the Gulf, whether it's to increase fisheries or to improve habitats, will certainly likely have positive effects on the local economies for recreational use, but also for the work that is being done to construct those projects as one example.

HOST: Are you worried that another event like Deepwater Horizon is going to happen in the future?

HELTON: I am worried that it could happen. These are rare events. We have routine spills every day that you don't read about in the newspaper, but these big ones are more like once-a-decade kind of scale. And a lot of my colleagues started their careers on Exxon Valdez, which was 36 years ago, and kind of ended it as experts on the Deepwater Horizon.

DIPINTO: Not so fun fact about the Deepwater Horizon incident. It is the oil spill equivalent of having the Exxon Valdez oil spill happen once a week in the same location for 12 weeks.

HOST: Wow, so it was that much bigger.

HELTON: Yeah, and a big thing about the Exxon Valdez is that you knew from the beginning that it is a finite amount. The ship’s only got 50 million gallons on it. They managed to keep most of it on the ship. They spilled 11 million gallons. We didn't know until the day it was capped that it wasn't going to go on for another 90 days or another 90 years.

DIPINTO: Yeah, these large infrastructure events are the ones that really keep me up more because of the unknown duration and the unknown volume of release.

HOST: How far offshore was Deepwater Horizon and are there oil rigs currently that or even further out? 

HELTON: Well, the Deepwater platform was an exploratory well that was being drilled. It was about 50 miles offshore, which is remote in one hand, but it's also the epicenter of the oil industry in the United States. Within hours, there were subsea robotic equipment to go down and look at the seafloor and any kind of heavy equipment you could imagine that oil spill response vessels that are bigger than the building that I'm in were only a few hours away. 

DIPINTO: And the weather was so unpredictable and challenging.

HELTON: Yeah, so there definitely are wells in deeper water and there are, I think it's in the thousands of production wells spread around the Gulf, so it's not just one or two.

HOST: As we look to the future, what are some lessons learned from Deepwater Horizon that could be applied to a future event?

DIPINTO: We're trying to normalize the use of some of the tools and technologies that have emerged during and since the Deepwater Horizon incident happened. The use of remote sensing, for example, is so common now. I say remote sensing, but what I really mean is the use of unmanned aircraft systems, which everybody knows as drones. So every small, medium, and large oil spill now, as one example, someone's going to be showing up in the response with drones. And collecting data, or, you know, I say collecting data, basically flying over the oil and reporting back what they're seeing. And what we are trying to do is to normalize the use of these technologies, such as drones or unmanned aircraft systems, that everyone has and can bring to an incident. And we're trying to help people optimize how they collect that data. So we would love it if we had people trained to fly in a certain way and collect images in a certain way that allow you to get the data off of your drone and upload it into our common operational picture. In the case of a NOAA spill, it's ERMA. And to make that into a map where you can just stitch together all your images and you'll be able to, with one glance, look where you've flown and look at that footprint of oiling and be able to get so much information at a glance. Oh, here's the footprint. It's about this big. It's a geo-reference map, so you'll know exactly where to send your responders. And, oh, look, in this area over here, that's where the heavy oil is. And over here, it's just a thin sheen. And if we could just normalize the collection of this kind of data with tools and with resources that we already have going on scene anyhow and rapidly deliver them in a format that everybody can see, and easily understand, and it's pretty irrefutable. I think that is a good outcome to understanding what is important to use for information to drive responses. It can be used as part of the natural resource damage assessment as well. So I'm happy to see us taking that and kind of running with that.

HOST: Well, I mean, 15 years and the momentum is still there. 

DIPINTO: One other thing I might mention is an area of research that we're interested in pursuing, we are actively pursuing, is our ability to detect oil in ice environments. So the Deepwater Horizon happened in the Gulf. It was a temperate climate, but with melting ice and potentially increased shipping traffic in these areas where we're going to have ice-infested waters, we've been pursuing different capabilities to be able to detect and find oil in these ice environments.

HOST: So even before there's a disaster…

DIPINTO: Right. How will you see the oil? Are there ways you can see oil trapped under ice? And can you see it from the air with downward facing sensors? So that's one more area I just thought might be interesting to mention.

HOST: Yeah, it's wonderful to hear about these projects.

HELTON: Yeah, I would say there's been a lot of interest in improving response capacity in the Arctic, not just in the U.S. Arctic, but through the efforts of all the Arctic countries trying to figure out what are the best tools and how would we protect some of these really pristine areas that have important petroleum resources. 

DIPINTO: And I think it's also important that we continue to maintain our capabilities that allow us to communicate with different agencies and different sources of assets that we would deploy on a spill. So things of this nature where we practice during peacetime, when we're not having an actual incident, but we communicate with various entities that we would normally communicate with for the next big incident, I think are really important to keep us in communication and in good practice so that when an actual incident happens, we're not just meeting each other for the first time and we'll have discussed what capabilities we all bring to the table and how best to coordinate.

HOST: This has been Allison Burrell with the NOAA Ocean Podcast. Check out our show notes to learn more about the National Ocean Service’s response and restoration efforts following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and check out all our episodes through the National Ocean Service website or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. Let’s keep making waves.