Cooperative Oil Spill Training—It's in Your Own Backyard

1999 ◽  
Vol 1999 (1) ◽  
pp. 367-371
Author(s):  
Jim E. Peschel
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
Puget Sound ◽  
Host Community ◽  
Management Skills ◽  
Incident Command ◽  
Training Costs ◽  
Actual Equipment ◽  
Protection Strategies ◽  
Spill Control

ABSTRACT In August 1997 the training and education workgroup of the Northwest Area Committee sponsored an Oil Spill Control Course specifically tailored to responders in the Pacific Northwest. The training provided management skills to supervisory field staff within the Operations Section of the Incident Command System. The course focused on personnel and equipment resources located in the Puget Sound region. The syllabus was designed, coordinated, and developed by a consortium of Federal and State regulatory agencies as well as the primary Oil Spill Removal Organizations in the Northwest region. Each agency participated without expending additional training costs by exchanging services-in-kind for quotas. An added benefit of this cooperation was the opportunity to train alongside responders from other agencies and organizations while using the actual equipment available within the region. The course used lectures and field exercises to focus on the Northwest Area Contingency Plan, Geographic Response Plans, oil product identification, shoreline countermeasures, cleanup techniques, and protection strategies typical within the Puget Sound operating environment. By using local instructors, actual equipment, and realistic scenarios, the local response community can continue to benefit from this type of tailor-made training and focus on the actual needs of the host community.

Oil Spill Management—The Brazoria County, Texas Approach

1999 ◽  
Vol 1999 (1) ◽  
pp. 913-914
Author(s):  
Jimmy A. Salinas
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Exercise Program ◽  
Protective Measures ◽  
The Public ◽  
Incident Command ◽  
Active Responding ◽  
Protection Strategies ◽  
Amount Of Knowledge ◽  
National Preparedness ◽  
Response Exercise

ABSTRACT Brazoria County, Texas has established a partnership of government, industry, and the public to ensure that management of spills in this county considers the local expertise, resources, and concerns when developing protection strategies and implementing spill response plans. In 1990 the Mega Borg oil spill, which occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, was initially projected to impact Brazoria County beaches and wetlands. In response to this threat the Brazoria County Judge, who is the Local On-Scene Coordinator (LOSC) for the county during emergencies, convened a meeting of the local emergency planning committee (LEPC) and the county's emergency management office. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the spill threat and determine what action, if any, could be taken. The Judge also called on various county officials, industry specialists, local federal trustees, and local environmentalists to participate. The meeting resulted in the establishment of an Oil Spill Subcommittee (OSS) to the LEPC. This subcommittee worked quickly to develop a protection plan should the oil spill threat become a reality. Specific protection priorities for the county's coastal areas was developed and included a contingency of county and industry responders who were prepared to initiate protective measures if required. The County Judge delivered the county's plan, concerns, and support to the Unified Incident Command (UIC) in Galveston, Texas. Since its inception the OSS has been active responding to spill threats, and participating in area wide National Preparedness for Response Exercise Program (PREP) Exercises in the county. The uniqueness of the OSS is that it draws expertise from different stake holders in the county and melds a local partnership that brings a vast amount of knowledge, experience, and resources in a unified effort. The Brazoria County OSS continues to improve its organization and stands ready to assist spill management when an incident threatens Brazoria County.

THE MASSACHUSETTS OIL SPILL CONTINGENCY PLANNING PROGRAM

1981 ◽  
Vol 1981 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-92
Author(s):  
B. J. Garry
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
Phase Iii ◽  
Contingency Planning ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Planning Program ◽  
Energy Impact ◽  
Contingency Plans ◽  
Protection Strategies ◽  
Spill Control

ABSTRACT Since August 1979, Massachusetts has been involved in a unique oil spill contingency planning program. This program, which is funded through the Coastal Energy Impact Program, involves three phases. Phase I entails the development of regional contingency plans. These plans, like others produced on larger and smaller scales, will include such information as the location of oil spill response equipment, the identification of Highly Vulnerable Areas (HVAs), including specific protection strategies and the identification of local personnel-either Harbormasters, shellfish officers, or firefighting personnel-available for a limited local response to any oil spill. Phase II of the program involves training these local personnel in the basics of oil spill control. The training will emphasize hands-on deployment of boom under various weather and sea conditions and in various natural environments. The training course will be based at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, will last for 3.5 days and will accommodate 12 to 15 students at each 3.5-day session. Phase III, which will not be realized until contingency plans are printed and local personnel trained, involves the purchase of oil spill containment equipment for local use. Although a definite funding source has yet to be identified, legislation establishing a minimal per-barrel coastal oil transfer tax has been filed and will be considered by the state legislature in the near future. The Massachusetts Oil Spill Contingency Planning Program is currently being implemented in Dukes, Nantucket, and Barnstable Counties. Over the next 2 years, the program will be expanded to include the entire Massachusetts coast, excluding Boston Harbor.

OIL SPILL TRAINING: THE NEED CONTINUES

1987 ◽  
Vol 1987 (1) ◽  
pp. 565-567
Author(s):  
Robert J. Meyers ◽  
J. Larry Payne ◽  
Clyde B. Strong
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Classroom Environment ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Training Costs ◽  
Economic Climate ◽  
Limited Experience ◽  
Time Scheduling ◽  
Training Activities ◽  
Spill Control

ABSTRACT To effectively handle oil spill incidents, response personnel must possess certain knowledge relevant to spill control activities. These personnel must demonstrate adequate manipulative and problem-solving abilities—practical skills—that can be used in managing oil spills. As a rule, this knowledge and these skills are obtained by one of two means. Response personnel attend and participate in training activities, or they learn from experience. Learning strictly by experience can provide valuable lessons, but such a method proves costly, inefficient, and incomplete in the long term. On the other hand, classroom and field programs in spill control are readily available and, to some extent, are successful in providing general knowledge to a broad audience. Time, scheduling, and especially financial constraints must be considered in planning training activities. Careful planning of an overall training can result in a series of short programs that, if properly designed and sequenced, can provide stronger results than an intensive program. Many companies are modifying budgets as a result of the current economic climate, however the need for training continues. In the long term, benefits gained by responding promptly and effectively to environmental incidents can far outweigh the insignificant training costs involved. With recent industrywide reductions in experienced manpower it is even more important that personnel with limited experience be well trained to handle an emergency when it arises. The training programs described in this paper are designed with this current situation in mind. Special emphasis is placed here on simulation exercises. Such exercises familiarize participants with their roles, relations, responsibilities, interfaces, and communications procedures during a spill cleanup operation, and also address crisis management, all in a classroom environment. Examples of actual simulations conducted at several Sohio facilities with state-of-the-art computer enhancement will be presented, and their benefits discussed.

EQUIPMENT RESOURCE INVENTORY FOR OIL SPILL RESPONSES

2005 ◽  
Vol 2005 (1) ◽  
pp. 1073-1076
Author(s):  
John Crawford ◽  
Scott Knutson ◽  
Jim Haugen ◽  
Ross McDonald ◽  
Devon Grennan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Oil Spill ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
The United States ◽  
Hard Copy ◽  
New Members ◽  
Incident Command ◽  
Oil Storage ◽  
Resource Inventory ◽  
Current Resource

ABSTRACT This paper will describe the online cataloging of oil spill equipment that has taken place on the West Coast of the United States. A collaborative effort, the cataloging project was developed as a Northwest ad hoc undertaking to meet the equipment-listing requirement of the Area Contingency Plan. The intent was to assemble Oil Spill Response Organizations (OSROs) equipment lists into an Excel® spreadsheet format. Project participants in Washington and Oregon began equipment listing and over time, the process expanded to new members in California and Canada. Individual owners of equipment keep the data up-to-date. All equipment-location moves and acquisition changes are posted to the Internet site, yielding a current resource inventory that can be easily accessed 2417. The computer allows this equipment to be displayed, sorted by type, location, and tracked by date/time. The Excel® spreadsheet data can easily be manipulated to accurately tabulate, among other things, how much boom is available or in use, how much oil can be recovered, and how much oil storage is available. Hard copy equipment lists, which soon became outdated, are a thing of the past. The spreadsheets are used on a weekly basis for drill and spill applications as a tool to assist the Incident Command System's (ICS) Operation, Planning and Logistic sections to assemble, track and order specialized response equipment. The states of Washington and Oregon are using the list as a “database of record.” This is a great tool for the ICS Situation Unit when filling out the Incident Status Summary (ICS Form 209). In addition, individual lines of equipment or equipment systems can easily be printed onto ICS T-cards from Excel® by using a mail-merge program. A uniform Excel®-formatted response-equipment list is flexible, simple to use and easy to access. Undoubtedly, it has contributed to improving response management in the Pacific Northwest.

SITE INFORMATION AND SPILL RESPONSE STRATEGY (SISRS) AND THE SISRS DATABASE: CALIFORNIA'S APPROACH TO MARINE OIL SPILL PROTECTION PLANNING AND RESPONSE FOR SENSITIVE SITES1

2001 ◽  
Vol 2001 (2) ◽  
pp. 1093-1100
Author(s):  
Carl Jochums ◽  
Spencer Ung
Keyword(s):  
Oil Spill ◽  
Information Source ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Response Strategy ◽  
Contingency Planning ◽  
Planning Tool ◽  
California Department ◽  
Incident Command ◽  
Port Area ◽  
Protection Strategies

ABSTRACT The California Department of Fish and Game (DFG) has developed a database of sensitive site information and oil spill protection strategies as a part of the California coastal contingency planning. The Site Information and Spill Response Strategy (SISRS) approach was developed to enable involvement and ownership of Port Area Contingency Plan (ACP) strategies among stakeholders, as well as provide consistency in site documentation and strategy development for the widely variable habitats of the long California coast. Through site visits and tabletop discussions, the Area Committee uses this approach to incorporate the input of state and federal trustees, contingency planners, and stakeholders (industry, spill response co-ops and contractors, environmentalists, other agencies) to form a consensus on the appropriate site protection strategies and response resources. This information is stored in the SISRS database. The SISRS database has important benefits. It generates uniform Site Summary and Site Strategy pages across the six ACPs of California. Through the Internet, the database maximizes the opportunity to use the ACP as both a planning tool and a response tool. As a planning tool, the ACP and the generative database, maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), is the relatively rigid benchmark for the contingency planning for regulated facilities and vessels under state and federal laws, and is a ready digital information source. As a response tool, DFG maintains the SISRS database (on its Web site), which includes strategy revisions as often as the Area Committee approves revisions and updates. This database is used to expedite the spill response and produce Incident Command System (ICS) response documents with the most current information. The response version is a ready source of information for third-party software products for spill response management, such as response forms and resource ordering and management documents.

Environmental controls in Pacific Northwest intertidal marsh plant communities

1983 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1105-1116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kern Ewing
Keyword(s):  
Redox Potential ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Soil Texture ◽  
Puget Sound ◽  
Principal Component ◽  
Organic Content ◽  
Mode Analysis ◽  
Soil Redox Potential ◽  
Soil Redox ◽  
Environmental Controls

Relationships between environmental variables and species distribution were studied in a brackish intertidal marsh formed by the Skagit River as it enters the Puget Sound bay system in Washington. Transects were established which covered the range of environmental variation in the marsh. A grid of environmental measuring stations provided information on soil texture, organic content of soil fines, macroorganic material in the soil, soil temperatures, interstitial soil water salinity, soil redox potential, and site elevation. Binary discriminant analysis, a nonparametric method using species presence–absence data, was used to construct standardized residual matrices. Principal component analysis of standardized residuals (Q mode) indicated that salinity and soil texture were strongly correlated with the first factor generated, elevation with the second, and soil redox potential with the third. The factors explained, respectively, 48, 21, and 14% of the variance in the residuals matrix. From R-mode analysis, eight community types were derived: three dominated by Carex lyngbyei, two by Scirpus americanus, one by Scirpus maritimus, and two which are highly diverse.

Ella Rhoads Higginson

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
New England ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Private School ◽  
White Women ◽  
White Male ◽  
Puget Sound ◽  
Her Family ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
City Newspaper

Ella Rhoads Higginson (b. 1862?–d. 1940) was born in Council Grove, Kansas, a launching point for westward movement of settler colonialists. When she was a child, her family moved to Oregon, traveling in a wagon train following the old Oregon Trail. The family eventually settled in Oregon City, where she was educated in private school. Ella’s strong interests in reading and writing began early. Her parents possessed a substantial library that included books by Irving, Longfellow, Shakespeare, and Tennyson. Ella began writing when she was eight. Her first publication, the poem “Dreams of the Past,” appeared in The Oregon City newspaper when she was fourteen. The following year she began work on The Oregon City Enterprise newspaper, learning typesetting and editorial writing. She also started publishing fiction. In 1885, she married Russell Carden Higginson, a businessman who was a cousin to New England author Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The couple moved north to Whatcom (later Bellingham), Washington, where Higginson lived for fifty-two years until her death. There she devoted herself to writing. She soon became the first influential Pacific Northwest author. People around the world were introduced to the region when they read Higginson’s award-winning writing. Her descriptions of majestic mountains, vast forests, and the scenic waters of the Puget Sound presented the then-remote, unfamiliar Pacific Northwest to eager readers. Her characterizations of white women and men who inhabited the region revealed what life was like in this part of the nation as opposed to regions such as New England. Higginson’s celebrated writings were the first to place the Pacific Northwest on the literary map. Her talent was widely recognized. The prestigious Macmillan Company, which became her publisher, approached her seeking to print her work. She was awarded prizes from magazines such as Collier’s and McClure’s. Her poems were set to music and performed internationally. She published over eight hundred works in her lifetime. However, World War I altered the means of production, resulting in books going out of print and diminishing reputations of well-known authors, especially writers of color and women. Most of Higginson’s books went out of print. After the war, new editors, mostly white men, managed US newspapers, periodicals, and publishing companies. Largely uninterested in prewar authors, they sought writing from nascent literary movements such as Modernism while also promoting works by overlooked white male authors such as Melville. Higginson’s reputation faded in the last decades of her life. By the time she was chosen first Poet Laureate of Washington State in 1931, she and her work were largely remembered only in the Pacific Northwest. When she died in 1940, she was almost completely forgotten. In the 21st century, Higginson and her writings are returning to literary distinction.

Geoarchaeological Perspectives on the “Millennial Series” of Earthquakes in the Southern Puget Lowland, Washington, USA

Radiocarbon ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (5) ◽  
pp. 917-941 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Puget Sound ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Hood Canal ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Abrupt Changes ◽  
Western Washington ◽  
Socioeconomic Consequences ◽  
Large Earthquakes

Surface-breaking ruptures on shallow crustal faults in the southern Puget Lowland in western Washington State about a millennium ago prompted abrupt changes in land level and triggered tsunamis in Puget Sound. The displacement on the Seattle fault most likely occurred in the 1050–1020 cal BP interval. Structures further south (the Tacoma and Olympia faults, and one or more faults in the southern Hood Canal zone) ruptured at about the same time, or slightly earlier. The low frequency of radiocarbon ages from archaeological sites in the region in the aftermath of the “millennial series” of earthquakes, when compared to bootstrapped samples from a database of 1255 ages from the Pacific Northwest as a whole, suggests that these very large earthquakes had significant socioeconomic consequences. The cultural record from coastal archaeological sites shows that although survivors camped on the shore in the aftermath, many coastal villages appear to have been abandoned, and were not reoccupied for several centuries. There is little evidence, however, to suggest that people migrated from southern Puget Sound to neighboring areas, and no evidence of social conflict in the adjacent areas that might have served as havens.

scholarly journals Boater Safety: Communicating Weather Forecast Information to High-Stakes End Users

2012 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Savelli ◽  
Susan Joslyn
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Puget Sound ◽  
Weather Forecast ◽  
High Rate ◽  
False Alarms ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Precautionary Action ◽  
Time Of Year ◽  
Almost All

Abstract Recreational boaters in the Pacific Northwest understand that there is uncertainty inherent in deterministic forecasts as well as some of the factors that increase uncertainty. This was determined in an online survey of 166 boaters in the Puget Sound area. Understanding was probed using questions that asked respondents what they expected to observe when given a deterministic forecast with a specified lead time, for a particular weather parameter, during a particular time of year. It was also probed by asking respondents to estimate the number of observations, out of 100 or out of 10, that they expected to fall within specified ranges around the deterministic forecast. Almost all respondents anticipated some uncertainty in the deterministic forecast as well as specific biases, most of which were born out by an analysis of local National Weather Service verification data. Interestingly, uncertainty and biases were anticipated for categorical forecasts indicating a range of values as well, suggesting that specifying numeric uncertainty would improve understanding. Furthermore, respondents’ answers suggested that they expected a high rate of false alarms among warning and advisory forecasts. Nonetheless, boaters indicated that they would take precautionary action in response to such warnings, in proportions related to the size of boat they were operating. This suggests that uncertainty forecasts would be useful to these experienced forecast consumers, allowing them to adapt the forecast to their specific boating situation with greater confidence.

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