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Some lessons learned: USCG report puts DWH record straight
Much has been said and written about the causes and consequences of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and about the scramble to respond to an oil spill that no one appeared adequately prepared to deal with. However, the U.S. Coast Guard’s incident report, known as the Incident Specific Preparedness Review, or ISPR, provides some fascinating insights into lessons learned from how the response was conducted, and how those lessons might be applied to planning for some future oil spill contingency.
And the annual meeting of the Pacific States/British Columbia Oil Spill Task Force, held in Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 24, particularly focused on the ISPR findings.
Effective operation U.S. Coast Guard Reserve Rear Admiral (retired) Carlton Moore, vice chairman of the ISPR team, told the task force that, despite many public perceptions to the contrary, the organization responding to Deepwater Horizon operated effectively.
The ISPR report, published in January, reinforces this point, saying that the Coast Guard and BP, the party responsible for the spill, had worked together cooperatively to deal with the disaster.
“Media reports often left viewers with the impression that the Coast Guard and the responsible party were at odds periodically during the response,” the report says. “To the contrary, the (ISPR) team observed that personnel provided by the responsible party and Coast Guard personnel worked effectively together, and that there was ‘unity of effort’ throughout the response organization.”
However, the response organization was ill equipped to address the political fallout from the response, as day after day people around the country watched television images of oil and gas gushing from the seafloor of the Gulf, Moore said.
“There was a huge public perception, accurate or not, that we were not able to effectively respond,” he said.
Understated flow rates Successive major understatements of the oil flow rates from the Macondo well also undermined public confidence, Moore said.
“The most devastating thing that happened during the Deepwater Horizon response, as it was viewed by the public, was that there was this constant impression that the Coast Guard, other federal agencies and BP didn’t know what was coming out of the well,” Moore said. “And so there was a loss of confidence in many sectors about the response generally.”
In the absence of reliable flow-rate data it would have been better either to quote a worst-case scenario or to simply state that the flow rate estimates were still a work in progress, he said.
However, the ISPR investigators determined that the lack of knowledge of the oil flow rates had not in general impacted the response, except in the subsea application of oil dispersants — the use of subsea dispersants would have been more effective had the quantities of dispersant applied been calculated using a more realistic flow rate than the 8,000 barrels per day rate that the dispersant operation had assumed, Moore said. In addition, in a constant push to deploy as much surface oil recovery capacity as possible, no one knew how much capacity was really needed, he said.
Debbie Payton, chief of NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, Emergency Response Division, told the task force that communication shortcomings from the response effort had contributed to public angst over the subsea plume emanating from the Macondo well. In reality, oil from the well floated rapidly to the surface, leaving a plume that consisted of methane and some fine particulate material, she said.
“If you collected a sample of it you couldn’t see it because the particles were so microscopic,” she said.
Communication disconnect Apparently a prime cause of political and organizational difficulties during the response was a disconnect between the national response to the oil spill and local perceptions of how the response should be conducted.
The national procedure for responding to a major oil spill incident is based on what is termed the National Contingency Plan, using an organizational scheme called the incident command system, or ICS. ICS is a command-and-control organizational system, in which a unified command directs operations, with instructions cascading down the organizational hierarchy and the responsible party funding the response operations. The unified command consists of representatives of the responsible party; of the federal government, in this case in the form of the U.S. Coast Guard; and of states impacted by the spill.
But local parishes and counties in states such as Louisiana, in the wake of hurricane Katrina, are more familiar with an alternative disaster response scheme, known as the National Response Framework, in which local governments instigate their own response operations using funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
At cross-purposes The consequence was that local government organizations tended to take their own actions in response to the evolving Deepwater Horizon incident, sometimes working at cross purposes to actions directed by the unified command and leading to situations such as “boom wars,” in which different jurisdictions would squabble over how much boom went where. In one instance a local sheriff prevented a boom truck from moving some boom from one parish to another, Moore said.
ISPR team member Brian House, CEO of Moran Environmental Recovery and director of the Spill Control Association of America, told the task force that confusion between tasks directed by local jurisdictions and tasks directed through the ICS organization created significant problems with the operation of “vessels of opportunity” contracted to support inshore activities. Vessel of opportunity operations progressed much more smoothly in offshore areas, he said.
The deployment of spill response resources from one Coast Guard sector to another also became a significant issue during the Deepwater Horizon response, in particular because moving a piece of equipment out of a sector can violate the terms of a spill contingency plan for that sector, House said. It is necessary to establish new rules of engagement for the movement of equipment between sectors, he said.
Local frustration Moore said that local governments, frustrated with what they saw as confusion over how the response was being conducted, also made their own media presentations rather than working through the ICS information center. For example, the president of one parish appeared multiple times on CNN, lambasting the effectiveness of the response, he said.
A key to avoiding future communications problems between an ICS organization and local governments is the more effective operation of the area committees that oversee the development and maintenance of what are termed “area contingency plans,” plans that among other things document strategies for the protection of environmentally sensitive areas, Moore said.
The area committees act as prime points of contact between the Coast Guard and local communities, enabling mutual understanding of the National Contingency Plan and of the tasks involved in responding to a spill in a particular region. But the ISPR team found that around the Gulf coast there had been major disparities between different Coast Guard sectors both in the operation of the committees and in the completeness of the area plans, Moore said.
“The (area contingency) plan is a function of the amount of effort that goes into it,” said Greg Pollock, a member of the ISPR investigation team. “The Coast Guard should update its area contingency plan policy … and increase oversight to ensure area committees are developing comprehensive and functional area contingency plans nationwide.”
The potential use of vessels of opportunity also needs to be integrated into area contingency plans, with the local planning and training approach employed in Alaska providing a good example of what can be done to prepare in advance for an oil spill emergency, House said, presumably referring to the fishing vessel program that supports oil spill contingency plans for Alaska’s Prince William Sound.
—Alan Bailey
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