Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Restoration (DWH)
The NOAA Deepwater Horizon (DWH) Program is a NOAA-wide effort focused on restoring injuries to natural resources and services from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. As the lead science agency for coastal oil spills, NOAA was on the scene from the earliest moment of the DWH oil spill crisis. In the six years following, NOAA assessed the damages, quantified the injury, and determined the types and cost of restoration needed. This work resulted in the 2016 Deepwater Horizon Programmatic Damage Assessment and Restoration Plan and Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PDARP), which detailed the natural resource injuries from the oil spill and selected a comprehensive, integrated ecosystem approach to best restore those resources at an ecosystem level. In addition to serving as a member of the Deepwater Horizon Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) Trustee Council implementing restoration work guided by the PDARP, NOAA also supports the Department of Commerce’s role as a member of the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Council, which manages the DWH restoration efforts conducted under the RESTORE Act. To support the extensive restoration efforts, NOAA has been working alongside our state, federal, academic, non-profit partners, and the public to implement the best approaches to restoring the Gulf of Mexico resources and habitats. NOAA is particularly focused on identifying and conducting work to advance science needs to either fill data gaps needed to better target restoration or to advance our ability to monitor and evaluate restoration outcomes for NOAA trust resources, including assessing deep benthic and mesophotic communities on the seafloor and monitoring the effects of restoration activities on injured marine mammals, sea turtles, and Gulf fish and invertebrate species and their coastal and marine habitats..