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Experience Counts During a crisis, institutional coordination is notorious for being simultaneously essential and extraordinarily difficult to achieve. Without coordination, initiatives fail, protocol is breached and image can be tainted. Getting everyone on the same page is an almost impossible task, but sometimes there is no choice. As Louisiana’s flagship university and a public institution of higher learning, LSU had an obligation to take a leading role in responding to this crisis. Unlike most other schools, the LSU community had prior experience in responding to large-scale disasters. Five years earlier, the university acted as a triage center for the elderly and incapacitated before, during and after Hurricane Katrina, and as a shelter for those evacuated from New Orleans. Though handled successfully, the university ran into many difficulties during the response, particularly related to communications and research, which resulted in significant learning around crisis management. While communicating during a crisis is always difficult, a lack of electricity, barrage of international media and overloaded phone networks created more problems than usual. On the academic side, in an effort to stimulate research related to the storm, LSU’s Office of Research & Economic Development, or ORED, and the LSU Faculty Senate joined forces to offer faculty a mechanism for collaborative research in the form of a workshop and public forum to share ideas. Though sound in principle, it was probably held too late after the event to truly achieve its purpose. In fact, at least one university researcher – John Pardue, Elizabeth Howell Stewart Endowed Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering – had already published a scholarly article about the hurricane by the time the forum was held. Using institutional memory and experience to its advantage, ORED decided to act swiftly and do whatever it could to ensure an effective response to the spill so that important opportunities to collect critical data were not lost.