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Contingency & Response Planning
Careful planning is essential to effectively prepare for oil spills. Developing a strategy and an operational plan before the event will result in a far more efficient and considered response. The process of producing a contingency plan identifies roles and responsibilities, priorities for protection, effective response strategies and operational procedures without the added pressure of a real spill incident. A well exercised contingency plan promotes trained and practised personnel, and maximises the preparedness of the organisations and individuals involved in a response.
Once a response to an oil spill has been initiated, continuous planning remains an important process to guide operations and monitor their effectiveness. It ensures that response techniques are adaptive to reflect changing circumstances inherent to the nature of marine oil spills. Aerial surveillance is an important element of planning during a response, and can establish the scale and nature of an incident at an early stage. Once a response is underway, aerial surveillance can be used to guide, monitor, and evaluate the effectiveness of operations.
Explore Documents on Contingency & Response Planning
This paper describes the principles of boom design and the two main modes of operation, namely towing by vessels at sea and mooring in shallow or inshore waters.
This paper describes the fundamental requirements for the successful use of skimmers in the situations most likely to be encountered during an oil spill and should be read in conjunction with other ITOPF papers in this series, in particular, on the use of booms, shoreline clean-up techniques and the disposal of oil.
In cases of large spills, the source of stranded oil may be obvious, but the question of identification frequently arises when a small amount of oil is involved and compensation is sought for damage or clean-up costs. The purpose of this paper is to assist the reader in recognising both the type and quantity of oil on differing shorelines.