Content
Selected oil spills off US coastal waters and other incidents where NOAA's Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) provided scientific support for the spill response.
The file is in the UTF-8 character set with Excel formatting conventions. Null values are represented by "" (an empty cell). Boolean values are represented by "1" (true) and "0" (false). Dates are in "YYYY-MM-DD" format. Embedded newlines in text fields are replaced by a vertical tab character (ctrl-K, \v, 0xb) because a few programs mistake them for end-of-record markers.
Fields
id (integer)
Our incident ID.
open_date (date)
The date OR&R was notified of the spill. (For pre-1985 spills from third-party databases, the spill date in the source database.)
name (text)
Incident name.
location (text)
Incident location. Usually "City, State".
lat (float)
Latitude. Positive is north, negative is south. Value may be approximate.
lon (float)
Longitude. Positive is east, negative is west. Value may be approximate.
threat (text)
The primary threat: "Oil", "Chemical", or "Other". "Oil" means an oil spill. "Chemical" means a chemical or biological agent spill. "Other" means some other kind of incident.
tags (text)
The tags assigned to the incident. These are mostly causes (what caused the incident). The current list of tags are:
Adrift
Collision
Coral
Derelict
Grounding
Historic Wreck
Hurricane
Marine Debris
Marine Mammal
Mystery Substance
Pipeline
Railcar
Search + Rescue
Tsunami
Wellhead
Multiple tags are delimited by a pipe symbol (|).
commodity (text)
The item spilled. (Freeform text.)
is_measure_skim (boolean)
True if On-Water Recovery (skimming) was used as a countermeasure.
is_measure_shore (boolean)
True if Shoreline Cleanup was used as a countermeasure.
is_measure_bio (boolean)
True if Bioremediation was used as a countermeasure.
is_measure_disperse (boolean)
True if Dispersants were used as a countermeasure.
is_measure_burn (boolean)
True if In-Situ Burning was used as a countermeasure.
max_ptl_release_gallons (float)
Maximum potential release in gallons. This may be a known quantity or the upper bound of a minimum-maximum estimate. Note that different commodities have different toxicities and reaction characteristics, so 10,000 gallons of one material may be more significant than 10,000 gallons of another.
Blank values indicate that the potential release is unknown or can't be converted to gallons. As of May 2016, 2% of the releases were reported in a mass unit (e.g., pounds) that can't be converted to gallons because the database doesn't know the commodity's density.
posts (integer)
Number of posts in IncidentNews.
description (text)
Text description of the incident.
Acknowledgements
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration