Development of Multi-Hazard Contingency Plans and Tools for the National Marine Sanctuary System1

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the last few years, incidents such as the crash of Alaska Air Flight #261, the M/V Cape Mohican and SS Jacob Luckenbach spills and over 600 groundings a year in the Florida Keys have highlighted the need for coordinated, multi-hazard contingency planning to safeguard the marine, historical and cultural resources protected by the National Marine Sanctuary System. American waterways are a critical component of heightened homeland security; including the waters encompassed by marine protected areas. The challenge has been to develop consistent contingency plans that address a broad range of hazards from oil spills to hurricanes across 13 sites that are widely divergent in size, geographic location and type of resources. Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is larger than Yellowstone National Park and protects habitat ranging from coastal dunes to deep-ocean trenches while Fagatele Bay in American Samoa encompasses a coral reef inlet less than one square mile in size. Thunder Bay in Lake Huron and the U.S.S. Monitor sites focus on historical and cultural resources while habitat of humpback whales is the primary concern for the Hawaiian Islands sanctuary. Because of site diversity, regulations and prohibited activities vary widely. Jurisdictional issues are complex with nearly half of the sites incorporating state waters and shorelines. In 2001, NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration and the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries initiated a project to develop and build a suite of contingency plans and tools. This web-based contingency plan and tool set, hosted on a secure Intranet, is called Sanctuaries Hazardous Incident Emergency Logistics Database System (SHIELDS). SHIELDS gives resource managers efficient access to numerous NOAA databases, GIS systems, charts and images providing on-demand information for making critical decisions about environmental tradeoffs during a response.