The Natural Resource Advisor Program: an Innovative Approach to Protect Natural and Cultural Resources During the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Response

The Deepwater Horizon (MC252) oil spill response required the removal of oil from the affected shorelines of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.  Many of the shoreline cleanup activities had the potential to cause inadvertent but significant impacts to natural and cultural resources.  As part of an emergency section 7 consultation, the USFWS developed a list of Best Management Practices (BMPs) to be implemented to minimize the impacts to federally listed species, designated critical habitat, and candidate species.  Additional BMPs were developed to aid compliance with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permits and conditions required by state natural and cultural resource agencies.  The Deepwater Horizon SCAT group integrated these BMPs into their Shoreline Treatment Recommendations but, due to the size of the response area (>1000 miles), it was difficult for the SCAT teams to ensure BMP compliance throughout the entire response while fulfilling their primary duties.  Thus, the Mobile Unified Command, in close coordination with SCAT, USFWS and the NPS, developed an innovative approach, the Natural Resource Advisor (NRA) program, to oversee compliance with agency BMPs and assist operations crews in minimizing potential injury to natural and cultural resources.  The NRA program was comprised of 100 professional biologists distributed throughout the response area and imbedded within the field operations crews.  For ten months of the response, NRA Team Leaders attended daily operations planning meetings and offered suggestions to maximize cleanup efficiency while minimizing resource impacts.  NRAs delineated sensitive natural and cultural resources, directed cleanup crews and mechanized equipment away from these areas, and advised field operations on the least intrusive locations for staging and ingress/egress to the beach.  Cleanup activities in sensitive habitats (wetlands, dunes, bird and turtle nesting areas, etc.) were continuously monitored.  Where state or federal authorization was required, the NRAs took the lead in gathering the required permitting information.  The NRA program was extremely successful and achieved the primary program goal of assisting field operations personnel with BMP compliance.  It provided state and federal agency personnel with a single point of accountability for natural and cultural resource issues, collected data for the section 7 administrative record, reduced NRDA liability, and, most importantly, minimized impacts to the Gulf of Mexico shoreline during this historic response.