The Observer, July 2005

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Alyeska Viewpoint: Maintenance crucial to SERVS’ response readiness

By Mike Meadors

Maintenance is one of the most important activities SERVS (the Ship Escort Response Vessel System) undertakes to assure its readiness to respond to a spill.
Maintenance seldom receives the attention given to major equipment acquisitions, large oil spill drills, or significant research projects. SERVS’ maintenance team works to keep SERVS equipment “response ready.” This maintenance objective not only means maximizing equipment life but also reducing the risk of spills – including non-crude spills from equipment meant to respond to crude oil spills. At SERVS, we feel it is important for you to understand the importance we assign to maintenance.

People often think of SERVS as a single place, the teal-colored building that houses the Valdez Emergency Operations Center (VEOC), but SERVS is more accurately thought of as an archipelago of equipment sites scattered around Prince William Sound. The SERVS base alone is a collection of assets and facilities, each of vital importance to preparedness and response. It is a center for operations that includes the duty office, the VEOC, a repair shop, a helipad, and the dock where many (but not all) repairs to vessels and barges take place. Within the VEOC alone there are some 46 computers, 66 telephones, five fax machines and an array of other office equipment whose reliability can make a real difference in response.

SERVS’ assets beyond the water’s edge include ten tugs and eight barges and the response equipment they carry, 48 mini barges, five self-propelled skimming units, 34 workboats, three landing craft, and 42 miles of containment boom. Other response equipment is located across Port Valdez at the Valdez Marine Terminal, near the Valdez Duck Flats and the Valdez Fisheries Development Association Hatchery, and at four other hatcheries and six additional sites around the Sound. SERVS maintains seven mooring buoys in Port Valdez and four more across Prince William Sound, along with 26 non-mooring buoys, including those associated with hatchery protection boom. SERVS operates and maintains four communications sites, including the SERVS base, Reef Island, Johnstone Point, and Mt. Etches.

While SERVS’ marine contractor, Crowley Marine Services, is responsible for maintenance of the tugs and barges, SERVS and Tatitlek Chenega Chugach (TCC) employees perform maintenance on the response equipment found on both types of vessel, and work on many of the smaller work boats as well. SERVS and TCC teams maintain the mooring systems that, like the tugs and barges, endure a marine environment that is hostile to steel and machinery on a 24/7 basis. Maintenance of the buoy and anchor systems requires commercial dive support, just as can happen with maintenance of large vessels, along with readiness to tackle challenging weather conditions. Logistical support is required for many maintenance activities, some of which can be complex and dangerous jobs, such as the move of a repeater station to Mt. Etches entirely by boat and helicopter.

From radios and repeaters to skimmers and containment boom, SERVS maintenance activities involve over 6,000 preventative maintenance tasks per year. Just as with successful response, effective maintenance requires accurate documentation. It also requires that SERVS and TCC personnel work not only as good mechanics but also as careful observers, noting conditions of equipment that may not seem quite right and correcting them. Successful maintenance also requires attentiveness to experience and to lessons learned. Maintenance is more than simply “fixing broken stuff;” done well it ensures that equipment is replaced in a methodical and economic manner prior to the end of its operational life.

SERVS has developed a cross-functional team to assure the long-term success of its maintenance effort, a team that includes specialists with skills in electronics, telecommunications or marine systems, with generalists with good mechanical aptitude, a willingness to “measure twice and cut once,” and a willingness to test ideas and to learn from each other. This team approach extends to include the entire SERVS work force, from mechanics and responders to financial business analysts and planners.

SERVS’ emphasis on effective maintenance has received agency scrutiny, and agency commendation. An unannounced inspection from ADEC earlier this year resulted in a letter from the agency that described SERVS maintenance as a “new system which appears to enable Alyeska to more effectively manage their oil spill response resources.” At SERVS, we appreciate that sort of recognition, but we realize that just like the art of maintenance itself, the key is not performance in the past, but preparedness for the future.

• Mike Meadors is interim manager of Alyeska’s Ship Escort/Response Vessel System.