Case Study
Deepwater Horizon—Information Management for NRDA: Louisiana
By R. Dreas Nielsen, Associate of Integral
OUR CHALLENGE
The Deepwater Horizon accident was unprecedented with regard to the volume and urgency of data to be collected, organized, shared, and evaluated. A broad range of data types including in-water instrumentation, hydrocarbon chemistry, and counts of marine organisms were collected by multiple parties over a period of years. This extraordinary amount of information needed to be standardized and unified to support a cooperative natural resource damage assessment (NRDA).
OUR APPROACH
We created a customized version of Integral’s standard environmental database (IDB) as a centralized data repository, and established standard procedures for data management and quality control. Through successful coordination with multiple other consultants in the acquisition, organization, and quality assurance of the data, we facilitated data sharing between private parties and natural resource trustees.
OUR IMPACT
Rapid customization and deployment of a tailored and scalable solution allowed the high volume and rapid flow of data to be handled efficiently and with the highest standards of data integrity. Despite the rigorous requirements for this work, availability of data was never a bottleneck for NRDA analyses and interpretation.
Published
May 23, 2019
Key Contact
Mr. Dreas Nielsen is a senior science advisor at Integral Consulting Inc., who specializes in quantitative analysis of environmental data.... Full bio