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Privacy Policy

This Web site is provided as a public service by NOAA's Emergency Response Division (NOAA ERD). We welcome you as a site visitor. Here is an explanation of how we handle information we learn about you during your visit.

Most important, we do not collect personal information that would allow us to identify you by name or contact you directly (such as your email address), unless you choose to send that information to us. How we handle information about you depends on how you use our Web site:

1. If you visit our site, we collect and store just the following information about you:

• Your host name or IP address.
• The date and time when you visited pages on our site.
• The pages you viewed.

We use this information for site management purposes: for example, to learn how people visit the pages on our site, to find out which pages are of most interest to visitors, and to identify problems people are encountering on our site.

2. If you identify yourself by sending us an email containing personal information (such as your name):

• We use your information to respond to your request.
• We save your message in an email archive, which we use for site management purposes (for example, it's useful to us to see how many people have asked a particular question).

By sending us personal information, you are giving your consent for us to use the information for the stated purpose.

We do not use information about you in any other ways, and we do not share information about you with other parties. We do not use persistent tracking technologies. We use temporary session "cookies" for site navigation, but they are not saved between site visits. A cookie is a file placed on your hard drive by a Web site.

This privacy policy applies only to this Web site. NOAA also has a general privacy policy.

You can obtain more information about your rights under the Privacy Act of 1974 (as amended) from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Web site.

For the protection of users of our Web site, we have safeguards in place to identify and prevent unauthorized attempts to access or cause harm to information and systems. Unauthorized attempts to add or modify information on this Web site are strictly prohibited and may be punishable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 and the National Information Infrastructure Protection Act.