The Observer, September 2004
Spill drill exercises the handover of authority
By Tony Parkin
Project Manager
If there’s ever another big oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. is charged with running the first hours of the response. But at some point, the company responsible for the spill is supposed to take over.
Just how that would happen was tested in a large drill in Prince William Sound in early August.
The scenario had an escort tug colliding with an imaginary Conoco-Phillips tanker, the Polar Excelsior, as it headed out of Valdez with a load of North Slope crude at 8 p.m. on Aug. 3. The result was a hole in one of the Excelsior’s oil tanks and a 5,000 barrel spill in Valdez Arm, a few miles southwest of the city of Valdez.
The drill started at 8 o’clock the next morning, meaning that for drill purposes the response had been going on for 12 hours when the drill participants took their work stations at Alyeska’s Valdez Emergency Operations Center.
The Lady Samantha works near a response barge in Jack Bay during August's ConocoPhillips drill. Photo by Stan Jones, citizens' council.
In addition, the drill included some on-water activities, with a response barge and task force being deployed in Jack Bay. There, a Geographic Response Strategy was exercised, though that was not a specific part of the drill scenario.
Overall the greatest value of this drill was the chance for ConocoPhillips to bring its spill-response team to Valdez to see some of Prince William Sound and appreciate its beauty as well as the unique logistical challenges to responding to an oil spill here. Over 100 ConocoPhillips personnel came to Valdez for the drill, with more participating at Crisis Management Centers in Anchorage and Houston, Texas.
Another benefit of the drill was the chance for ConocoPhillips and Alyeska to work together and practice the all-important handover. That took place on the second day of the drill and was, generally speaking, a success.
However, one aspect that the citizens’ council wanted to see occur did not truly happen. That was the tricky process of transferring response management from Alyeska’s computer software – a system called Response TM – to IAP, the system used by ConocoPhillips. An artificiality of the drill – meaning a place where it wasn’t completely realistic – was that ConocoPhillips’ IAP software was running from the start and so no true transition from one system to the other was ever attempted. It remains unclear to the council how a transition would take place in a real event.
Besides testing the transition from Alyeska to ConocoPhillips, this drill exercised something new to oil spill planning in Prince William Sound: the Places of Refuge concept. This refers to the process of identifying in advance bays where a crippled tanker could be towed and anchored for repairs and for removal of its remaining oil. The citizens’ council has been participating in this process by helping evaluate various bays in Prince William Sound for this purpose.
Originally, the drill scenario called for the use of Jack Bay as a Place of Refuge. The council and other drill participants opposed this choice because the matrix developed for selecting places of refuge indicated Port Valdez was a better location for the stricken tanker in this scenario. Council staff coordinated a meeting with other stakeholders and presented the selection of Port Valdez to the Unified Command, and the destination of the tanker was changed.
Towards the end of the drill, with the shoreline being threatened by the spill, it was decided to conduct a tactical dispersant application. Despite computer modeling that showed the spilled oil to be non-dispersible after being in the water for so many hours, this tactic was approved by the Unified Command. The council believes all aspects of a drill – including decisions about when and where to use chemical dispersants – should be as realistic as possible, reflecting the processes and outcomes likely to occur in response to a real spill.
Another problem for the drill, the council believes, is that some of Alyeska’s key personnel didn’t take advantage of Coast Guard training in response management that was offered shortly before the drill. As a result, the drill didn’t go as smoothly as it could and should have. We hope Alyeska will make this a key lesson learned from this drill.
Nevertheless, the council thought the drill went well overall and was a very useful training exercise for those involved. Next year, ExxonMobil will conduct the big summer drill in Prince William Sound, and the council looks forward to working with that company, as well as with the Coast Guard, Alyeska, and the state Department of Environmental Conservation, to ensure that drill builds on what we learned this summer.