OFFSHORE OIL SPILL EQUIPMENT EVOLUTION IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA—A SYSTEMS APPROACH?1

1983 ◽  
Vol 1983 (1) ◽  
pp. 205-209
Author(s):  
Lindon A. Onstad
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Southern California ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Management Service ◽  
Outer Continental Shelf ◽  
Offshore Oil ◽  
Response Capability

ABSTRACT Exploration of outer continental shelf (OCS) lands off Southern California has been expanding at a rapid rate for the past two years. Lease Sales 48, 53, and 68 have provided the impetus for this rapid development. The Bureau of Land Management has predicted several spills in excess of 1,000 barrels will occur as a result of these sales and subsequent exploration activities. Legitimate concerns have been raised by federal, state and local governments as well as numerous citizen groups concerning the ability of industry to respond adequately to a major offshore oil spill. As a result of these concerns, the California Coastal Commission has ordered a study and evaluation of the California Oil Spill Cooperatives with an objective of ensuring they will possess an adequate response capability. Concurrent with this study, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding concerning review of oil spill plans and equipment in OCS waters. With expanding geographic areas to cover, the cooperatives have begun to purchase new state-of-the-art equipment in hopes of satisfying the regulatory agencies and concerned groups. This paper examines the process of the federal government, state of California and industry in upgrading oil spill response capability in waters offshore southern California. The process is shown to have occurred systematically with a view toward the response system rather than individual pieces of equipment. Recommendations to California concerning acceptance of federal guidelines, joint reviews and use of dispersants are discussed.

OIL SPILL CONTINGENCY PLANNING FOR GEORGES BANK

1983 ◽  
Vol 1983 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-128
Author(s):  
Elmer P. Danenberger ◽  
R. Barry Eldridge ◽  
Marshall Crocker
Keyword(s):  
Rhode Island ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Response Times ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Contingency Planning ◽  
Management Service ◽  
Georges Bank ◽  
Outer Continental Shelf ◽  
Marine Safety

ABSTRACT Lease Sale #42, held on December 18, 1979, provided the North Atlantic District of the Minerals Management Service (MMS) and the U. S. Coast Guard Marine Safety Office, Boston, an opportunity to develop oil spill contingency planning requirements for companies exploring for oil and gas on Georges Bank, one of the world's most productive fisheries. After extensive consultation with the Coast Guard's Marine Safety Office and Atlantic Strike Team representatives, Clean Atlantic Associates (CAA), an oil industry cleanup cooperative for the Atlantic outer continental shelf, received specific criteria regarding response times, sea-state capabilities, uptake rates, support vessels, storage capabilities, training, and drills. These criteria were developed with the assistance of a technical review board approved by the Commandant of the Coast Guard. CAA met the criteria by purchasing additional response equipment and further demonstrating the capabilities of existing equipment. Response equipment was maintained at two offshore locations to ensure that the specified six-hour response times could be achieved under normal conditions. The offshore response equipment was deployed by drilling personnel at offshore well sites. CAA and the Atlantic Strike Team successfully conducted a coordinated response exercise on July 30, 1981, in Rhode Island Sound. Additional training classes and a surprise offshore drill have been held subsequently.

scholarly journals THE STORY OF A SUCCESSFUL OIL SPILL COOPERATIVE: THE CORPUS CHRISTI AREA OIL SPILL CONTROL ASSOCIATION

1977 ◽  
Vol 1977 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-68
Author(s):  
Harry L. Franklin
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Environmental Protection Agency ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Beach Sand ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Corpus Christi ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Spill Control ◽  
Control Association

ABSTRACT The Corpus Christi Area Oil Spill Control Association, founded in 1970 as a nonprofit Texas corporation to provide the Coastal Bend area of South Texas with a reasonable capability to contain and harvest oil spills on the area's shallow waters, can be considered a successful cooperative for two primary reasons. The first is the smooth blending of industry with federal, state, and local governments to create a working entity. The association, originally funded by each of these partners, is governed by a five-man board with a representative from each. Its operating budget is shared by government and industry alike on a 50-50 basis. The second reason is the low average cleanup cost, 40 cents per gallon. To date the association has cleaned up 167 assorted spills with the first occurring in November 1971. The largest spill amounted to 8,000 barrels, covering approximately 10 miles of ship channel area; the smallest spill was less than one barrel. The association has been commended by the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Coast Guard, the State of Texas, and industry groups. It is the recipient of the Gold Medal Award from the National Sports Foundation and has been assigned the use of EPA's unique beach sand cleaner.

TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO STATE HAS GONE BEFORE1

1995 ◽  
Vol 1995 (1) ◽  
pp. 761-765
Author(s):  
William Boland ◽  
Pete Bontadelli
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Oil Pollution ◽  
Task Force ◽  
Action Plan ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Incident Management ◽  
Incident Command ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Marine Safety

ABSTRACT The Marine Safety Division of the 11th Coast Guard District and the California Office of Oil Spill Prevention and Response are pursuing new avenues to assure that federal, state, and local efforts in California achieve the goals of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 and the Lempert-Keene-Seastrand Oil Spill Prevention and Response Act of 1990. Coordination of the seven California area committees, publishing detailed area contingency plans, and the implemention of a memorandum of agreement on oil spill prevention and response highlight recent cooperative successes. In 1994 a joint Coast Guard/state/industry incident command system task force drafted an ICS field operations guide and incident action plan forms that meet National Interagency Incident Management System and fire scope ICS requirements.

United States Coast Guard (USCG) C-130 Air Dispersant Delivery System (ADDS) capability history, deployment in remote areas, and associated challenges

2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (1) ◽  
pp. 2017027
Author(s):  
Tim Gunter
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Delivery System ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
The United States ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Federal State ◽  
United States Coast Guard ◽  
Remote Areas ◽  
Oil Spill Response ◽  
State And Local

Among the variety of oil spill response countermeasures, including mechanical, chemical, in-situ burning and bioremediation, deployment of chemical dispersants has been successfully utilized in numerous oil spills. This paper will review the history of the United States Coast Guard (USCG) C-130 Air Dispersant Delivery System (ADDS) capability, deployment in remote areas, and associated challenges. ADDS consists of a large tank with dispersant(e.g., 51,000 pounds), owned and operated by an industry partner, used aboard USCG C-130 aircraft designed to be ADDS capable as specified in various agreements for marine environmental protection missions. ADDS is a highly complex tool to utilize, requiring extensive training by air crews and industry equipment technicians to safely and properly deploy during an oil spill response. In 2011, the Commandant of the USCG, Admiral Papp reaffirmed the USCG's C-130 ADDS capability during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and the Coast Guard. The use of ADDS in remote areas creates unique challenges, such as logistical coordination between the USCG and spill response industry partners and maintaining proficiency with personnel. It is critical for federal, state, and local agencies, industry, and academia to understand the history and challenges of ADDS to ensure the successful utilization of this response tool in an actual oil spill incident.

STATISTICAL ESTIMATES OF SHORELINE OIL CONTACT IN THE GULF OF MEXICO

2005 ◽  
Vol 2005 (1) ◽  
pp. 547-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter R. Johnson ◽  
Zhen-Gang Ji ◽  
Charles F. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Wind Speed ◽  
Gulf Of Mexico ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
Wind Field ◽  
Oil And Gas ◽  
Ocean Current ◽  
Management Service ◽  
Outer Continental Shelf ◽  
Statistical Estimates ◽  
Level Of Concern

ABSTRACT As steward of the Federal offshore lands known as the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), Minerals Management Service (MMS), is responsible for balancing the Nation's search for commercial oil and gas with protection of the human and marine environments. The MMS regulates the development of mineral resources in an environmentally safe manner by analyzing environmental consequences of the OCS program prior to lease sales or approval of industry's plans. The Oil-Spill Risk Analysis (OSRA) model was developed by the DOI for the analysis of possible oil-spill impact from offshore oil and gas operations. The OSRA model produces statistical estimates of hypothetical oil-spill occurrence and contact from projected OCS operations. The model generates an ensemble of sea surface oil-spill trajectories by initiating thousands of oil-spill simulations at hypothetical spill locations to statistically characterize oil-spill risk in areas of prospective drilling and production and along projected pipeline routes. The hypothetical spills are initiated every day and move at the velocity of the vector sum of the surface ocean currents plus an empirical wind-induced drift of speed equal to 3.5% of the local wind speed, with a wind-speed-dependent direction (Samuels et al., 1982). The model generates oil-spill trajectories by integrating interpolated values of the wind and ocean current fields at intervals short enough to use the full spatial resolution of the ocean current and wind fields. The OSRA model, as applied to the Gulf of Mexico, uses 3-hourly ocean current fields over 7 years (1993–1999) generated by the Princeton Regional Ocean Forecast System (PROFS) (Oey et al., 2004). The PROFS is driven by synoptic winds, heat flux, and river flows. The wind field is based on the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts surface winds enhanced by observations from meteorological buoys and Coastal-Marine Automated Network stations. The same wind field used to force the ocean model is used to move the oil in the spill trajectories. As an example of environmental assessment, the OSRA model was used to estimate the spreading of oil spills by simultaneously modeling fractions of each spill, referred to as spillets. The spillets were used to calculate additional statistics, in particular, the length of coastline contacted by a large spill. The coastline was divided into equal length segments. Assumptions were made regarding what fraction of the spill (i.e., the number of spillets) that contacted a land segment would constitute a contact larger than the “level of concern.” Sensitivity of the analysis to key assumed parameters, such as the number of spillets and the level of concern, were tested.

OIL SPILL SORBENTS: TESTING PROTOCOL AND CERTIFICATION LISTING PROGRAM

1993 ◽  
Vol 1993 (1) ◽  
pp. 549-551 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cooper ◽  
Ingvil Gausemel
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Petroleum Products ◽  
Test Methods ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
National Standard ◽  
Laboratory Evaluation ◽  
Management Service ◽  
Environment Canada ◽  
Operating Characteristics

ABSTRACT Environment Canada's Emergencies Engineering Division is spearheading a program in conjunction with the Canadian General Standards Board that would see the development of a certification and listing program in addition to a national standard for the testing of sorbent materials. Funding for this program is provided by Environment Canada (EC), Canadian Coast Guard (CCG), Marine Spill Response Corporation (MSRC), U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), and U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS). The test methods are based upon those defined by the American Society for Testing and Materials and previous test methods developed by Environment Canada for our series of reports entitled Selection Criteria and Laboratory Evaluation of Oil Spill Sorbents. This series, which was started in 1975, encompasses a number of commercially available oil spill sorbents tested with different petroleum products and hydrocarbon solvents. The testing program will categorize the sorbents according to their operating characteristics. The main categories are oil spills on water, oil spills on land, and industrial use. The characteristics we will be evaluating with the new test protocols include initial and maximum sorption capacities, water pickup, buoyancy, reuse potential, retention profile, disintegration (material integrity), and ease of application and retrieval. In the near future we plan to incorporate changes to the test that would involve increasing our list of test liquids to encompass spills in an industrial setting, in addition to testing sorbent booms and addressing the disposal problem.

scholarly journals A COORDINATED STATE/FEDERAL VOLUNTEER TRAINING PROGRAM1

1993 ◽  
Vol 1993 (1) ◽  
pp. 775-777
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Chuba ◽  
Elizabeth Dimmick
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Safety Data ◽  
Steering Committee ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Cooperative Effort ◽  
Computer Data ◽  
Inland Waterways ◽  
Computer Data Base ◽  
State And Local

ABSTRACT While the sinking of the Tenyo Maru and resultant oil spill off Washington's Olympic Peninsula in July 1991 was tragic, it fostered the birth of a cooperative effort by federal and state agencies to train volunteer responders prior to another oil spill. This effort, under the auspices of an Oregon nonprofit group known as SOLV (Stop Oregon Littering and Vandalism), is known as the SOS (SOLV Oil Spill) Steering committee. The purpose of the group is to train volunteer responders to aid federal, state, and local agencies in future oil spill cleanup activities. For the first time in the nation, governmental agencies have joined with corporations and environmental organizations in coordinating educational programs involving citizens in oil spill remediation efforts before the advent of a major spill that could affect coastal areas or inland waterways. Free classes meeting federal and state hazardous waste training criteria are offered quarterly to citizens interested in either volunteer wildlife rehabilitation or beach cleanup. The four-hour course was developed by the U.S. Coast Guard, Oregon State Department of Environmental Quality, and Oregon OSHA. Topics covered include agency responsibilities, site safety plans, general safety, toxicology, material safety data sheets, personal protective equipment, decontamination, heat stress, helicopter safety, and wildlife safety. In addition to course materials, participants receive a certificate and identification card verifying their training. A 1–800 number, computer data base, and newsletter are used to maintain contact with graduates. So far more than 600 volunteers have been trained and are ready to assist should the need arise.

A WORKSHOP FOR DEFINING THE ROLE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN OIL SPILL RESPONSE

1977 ◽  
Vol 1977 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. H. Putnam
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Petroleum Industry ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Hazardous Substance ◽  
Santa Barbara ◽  
California Department ◽  
Oil Spill Response

ABSTRACT In 1970, the National Oil and Hazardous Substance Pollution Contingency Plan was introduced. This plan, which imposed a planning sequence that flowed downward from the federal government, caused considerable confusion at local levels because of its failure to fully explain how local governments were to participate. To amplify the plan and overcome this shortcoming, the California Department of Fish and Game, the U.S. Coast Guard and the petroleum industry joined in 1974-75 to sponsor a series of oil spill workshops for local governments. The goal was to define the role of local jurisdictions in the planning process and illustrate through simulated problems how this role was to be carried out. The workshop described in this paper and a subsequent workshop in Santa Barbara dispelled the confusion of local governments over their roles in oil spill action and resulted in enthusiastic acceptance of the plan itself. A similar technique could be used in any other broadscale planning effort that is committed to seeking knowledgeable local participation.

MODELING IMPACTS OF RESPONSE METHOD AND CAPABILITY ON OIL SPILL COSTS AND DAMAGES FOR WASHINGTON STATE SPILL SCENARIOS

2005 ◽  
Vol 2005 (1) ◽  
pp. 467-473
Author(s):  
Dagmar Schmidt Etkin ◽  
Deborah French McCay ◽  
Jill Rowe ◽  
Linda Pilkey-Jarvis
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Oil Recovery ◽  
Initial Response ◽  
Washington State ◽  
Coast Guard ◽  
Response Options ◽  
Federal Response ◽  
Water Response ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Response Capability

ABSTRACT The issues and results of modeling major crude oil spill scenarios in outer coast and sound locations in the state of Washington, USA, to determine relative costs and impacts are explored. Oil spill trajectory and fate and effects modeling were coupled with modeling of response operation strategies (conventional mechanical containment and recovery operations; dispersant application with concurrent mechanical containment and recovery; and in-situ burning with concurrent mechanical containment and recovery) to estimate oil spill response costs and socioeconomic and environmental impacts. The complex issues in modeling the impact of response capability and timing of initial response operations were also examined, comparing the US Coast Guard (USCG) federal response capability standards, proposed Washington State standards, and potential theoretical higher response capability standards. Results of initial modeling showed little difference in costs and impacts between on-water response options and capability levels, with the exception of being significantly lower than the “no response” option, in which only protective shoreline response, but no on-water removal, were employed. The extremely high level of theoretical oil recovery (50 to 70%) that occurred in the modeling was adjusted in a second analysis to account for increasing inefficiencies in recovery capability with time, demonstrating that oil recovery under Washington State's earlier and more aggressive response standard was three times as high as under the federal response standard. Greater differences in costs and impacts were then realized. Increasing on-water oil removal through more efficient oil slick surveillance, training in strategic response, and more timely response can all contribute to reducing spill impacts and costs.

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