Incorporating wildlife effectively into oil spill exercises – An Australian Story

Australia holds regular National oil spill exercises through the National Plan for Maritime Emergencies. Two National Plan exercise activities that have taken place include Exercise Northerly held in Darwin (Northern Territory) in 2014 and Exercise Torres focussed on the Torres Straits (Queensland) in 2018. The overall aim of the two exercises were to implement and review the effectiveness of a combined Commonwealth (Federal), Territory/State and industry marine pollution response to a Level 3 pollution incident. Both Exercise Northerly and Exercise Torres included oiled wildlife response actions to practice and test. Exercise Northerly for wildlife was principally a desk top activity that included a number of injects relating to wildlife threatened and impacted by an oil spill event. Wildlife considered in Northerly included cetaceans, dugong, marine reptiles and seabirds. The key wildlife objectives for Northerly were to establish and maintain a wildlife Incident Management Team under the broader Incident Command structure and develop wildlife incident action plans for hazing wildlife and responding to oil impacted wildlife. Exercise Torres incorporated both planning and field based operational activities and considered cetaceans, dugong, marine reptiles and seabirds both threatened and impacted by oil pollution. Wildlife planning during exercise Torres was principally held in Cairns at the established Incident Control Centre where incident action plans were developed to haze oil threatened wildlife, collect oiled impacted wildlife and then rehabilitate wildlife considering the strict quarantine restrictions imposed on wildlife movements through and out of the Torres Strait Protection Zone. The field deployment activities for Torres were then managed and undertaken through a forward operations base established on Waiben Island, some 800 kilometres or 500 miles north of Cairns that borders Papua New Guinea. The wildlife field teams were required to establish an oiled wildlife response centre making it fully operational with pre-deployed equipment, manage responder safety for actual dangerous wildlife in the area, respond to reports of impacted wildlife, transport impacted mock wildlife through the different contaminant hazard zones (i.e. hot, warm and cold zones) and then to the wildlife care centre, undertake wildlife assessment using narrative techniques, triage wildlife based on provided wildlife assessment data, decontaminate mock wildlife and then provide basic wildlife rehabilitation practices. Both of the National exercises provided effective opportunities to practice the skills necessary to support oiled wildlife response actions and to identify key learnings for better practices when responding to oiled wildlife threatened and impacted in remote areas.