The Observer, May 2007

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From the Executive Director: Differing c-plan processes show value of citizen role

By John S. Devens, Executive Director

Approximately four years ago, Alyeska Pipeline started work on the complex process of preparing a new oil-spill contingency plan for its tanker terminal in Valdez. From our perspective, the company couldn’t have handled it better.

Alyeska and the state Department of Environmental Conservation set up a working group to develop the new plan and invited us to participate. Our concerns have been resolved along the way, and both we and Alyeska are confident the plan will do a good job of preventing oil spills at the Valdez terminal, and of ensuring an effective response if one should occur. When it’s submitted to the conservation department for approval in a few weeks, we have no doubt it will make it through its review by the agency and then by the public with few, if any, changes.

We consider this such a good example of how citizen involvement should work that we have nominated Alyeska for a Legacy Award, given annually by the Pacific States/British Columbia Oil Spill Task Force for exceptional projects in oil spill prevention, preparedness, or response; we also recommended that the state’s Division of Spill Prevention and Response be recognized for its part in the process. As I said in my letter of nomination, “This workgroup’s collaborative and cooperative approach to continuous improvement of the terminal contingency plan is unique in the State of Alaska.”

Also about four years ago, the shipping companies that haul oil out of the Valdez terminal started work on a new contingency plan for preventing and responding to tanker oil spills. The contrast could not have been more stark. We were almost completely excluded from the process, and did not see a draft of the new tanker plan until just before it was submitted to the state in February of this year.

Once we did see it, we identified many deficiencies, as did the state. The Department of Environmental Conservation deemed it ‘insufficient for review,’ meaning it wasn’t even good enough to go out for public comment, the final stage in the process of developing a contingency plan.

What was wrong with the plan? The conservation department’s basic complaint was that the plan wasn’t specific enough to show how or even whether it would work. As the agency said in its rejection letter to the shippers, “detail is lacking throughout the plan to allow the Department and the Public to determine how you intend to conduct and support your prevention and response objectives.”

The agency listed 24 specific defects in just three areas of the plan, and went on to caution the shippers that those areas “are, by no means, the only areas which need work in order for the Plan to be sufficient.”

Now the shippers have started over, and this time they’re following Alyeska’s example. They have formed a working group and included us. We’re happy to sit down with them to share our ideas and our nearly two decades of experience overseeing crude oil transportation in Prince William Sound. We hope for a final product as good as the one coming from Alyeska for its tanker terminal.

Still, the situation is far from ideal. The time lost on the unsatisfactory version submitted by the shippers in February has left everyone involved under a level of deadline pressure that makes it harder to perform a thorough review and achieve the kind of productive working group we enjoyed with the Alyeska plan.

When Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, it identified complacency as one of the causes of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. “One way to combat this complacency,” Congress declared, “is to involve local citizens in the process of preparing, adopting, and revising oil spill contingency plans.”

Congress’s wisdom has been demonstrated anew by the different outcomes of the two different contingency planning processes we’ve seen over the past four years.

We hope the shippers take a lesson from this experience: citizen oversight isn’t just good for the environment, it’s good for the oil industry, too, because it helps get things right the first time.