The Observer, September 2006

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Drill will test response capabilities

At five o’clock on the morning of September 26, a tanker called the SeaRiver Carrier will strike an unknown object in the shipping lanes between Bligh and Montague islands, and spill crude oil into Prince William Sound.

But only on paper. The SeaRiver Carrier doesn’t exist and neither will the oil.

It will all be part of a two-day drill being mounted by SeaRiver Maritime, the shipping arm of ExxonMobil.

The drill won’t involve any actual on-water activities. All of the simulated action – tugs and response barges rushing to the scene, helicopter overflights, network television crews flying in from around the world – will take place indoors at two sites in Valdez: Alyeska’s emergency operations center near the small-boat harbor, and the city’s convention center. There, drill participants will practice what they’d do in an actual spill: interacting to collect information about the accident, analyze the information, and decide how to respond, all the while ensuring that the responders are fed, housed and paid, and that reporters and the public can inform themselves about the spill.

Even though the spill is imaginary and the action simulated, the exercise will raise issues likely to be important in any real spill response.

One is the use of chemical oil-spill dispersants. Plans call for their “use” during the exercise. The council’s position is that dispersants should be banned in area waters until solid science shows they will work. However, for now, they do remain in the contingency plans that guide oil-spill response, and drill participants will go through the steps outlined in those plans to decide if conditions in the drill scenario would justify dispersant use.

The drill will also provide an opportunity to test one of the most critical phases in spill response management. It’s called ‘transition,’ and refers to the point at which operational control passes from Alyeska Pipeline’s Ship Escort/Response Vessel System – which is required to make the initial response to all spills -- to the actual spiller, which is SeaRiver in this drill.

In addition, the drill will test the Port of Refuge concept. This involves pre-identifying bays and inlets where a leaking tanker could be towed so that the spilled oil could be contained there, rather than staining hundreds of miles of shoreline as happened after the Exxon Valdez. The council helped regulatory agencies devise a list of potential places of refuge. The process was sensitive because shoreline landowners are naturally concerned about the prospect of a leaking tanker being towed in and anchored nearby.

Some of the citizens’ council staff will be part of the team charged with evaluating the success of the drill, while other staffers will observe the drill for the council’s own independent report.

“I’m eager to see how the transition goes,” said Roy Robertson, the council’s project manager for drills. “I haven’t seen that before – the spiller actually coming in and taking over management.”

The drill was originally scheduled for fall of last year, but SeaRiver postponed it after Exxon’s Houston headquarters had to be evacuated because of a hurricane.

The next major drill in the Sound, organized by BP, will take place in May 2007.