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Planning for human side of a response Negative perceptions and the failure to identify peoples’ needs can seriously undermine the outcome of responding to an oil spill Alan Bailey Petroleum News
Oil spill contingency plans are typically, and correctly, replete with reams of technical details about needed resources and activities should the unthinkable happen and an accident causes a major unintended discharge of oil into the environment. But organizations ignore at their risk the public perceptions of what is happening during a response and the interactions with stakeholders in the region impacted by a spill.
Arguing that contingency plans should include comprehensive plans for dealing with these “human dimensions” of a response, Nancy Kinner, director of the Coastal Response Research Center, University of New Hampshire, told the Marcus Evans Arctic Drilling Safety Preparedness and Response Conference on Aug. 16 that organizations generally fail to plan adequately for such issues, despite the fact that problems on the human side of a response can rapidly create severe difficulties. Responders need training in these human dimensions, she said
Spills impact humans and humans value the natural resources impacted by spills, she said.
Disconnect As an example of a disconnect between a response project and the public, Kinner cited public perceptions of the Deepwater Horizon response. These perceptions generally hold that the response failed, with oil reaching beaches, fish dying, whales dying and with some people thinking that there was oil pollution in New Orleans, she said. But most people who were actually involved in the response thought that the response was extremely successful, with little oil reaching the shore and minimal ultimate impact on Gulf of Mexico fisheries, she said.
And new personal media add new challenges to the dissemination of information. An analysis of Twitter feeds relating to the use of dispersants during the Deepwater Horizon response is particularly revealing: The frequent use of the word “cleanup” in early Twitter messages rapidly transitioned to “bad” being the most common word used, she said.
During a Repsol incident response on the North Slope a video clip filmed on site by someone using a mobile phone was posted on U-Tube within 10 minutes, Kinner said.
Anticipating interests So, a key question is how to keep ahead of this type of information dissemination and how to anticipate the interests of the community, as distinct from the interests of the responders, she said. When communicating with the public, it is important to encourage feedback rather than try to shut the public out. It is also vital to recognize the cultural values and norms of the community, Kinner said.
When communicating risks and the status of a response, while the difference between what the public and the responders perceive is critically important, it is difficult to foresee what those public perceptions might become. And so critical questions in response planning relate to figuring out who might be impacted by a spill and what metrics these people might look for in gauging success. It is important to understand in advance who the public is and, as far as possible, what its expectations are, rather than trying to determine this on the fly during a response, Kinner said.
For example, the cumulative volume of oil gathered by skimmers may be of great interest to the response team but of limited interest to the local community. On the other hand, a fishing community will look for information about when a fishery will re-open.
Community involvement Community involvement and stakeholder communication are critically important, even if that means conveying bad news such as an inability to recover all of the oil, Kinner said.
Potential impacts on subsistence living are a big issue, with oil spills always equating to subsistence losses, Kinner said, adding that it is important to be realistic in setting expectations. She said that during a visit to the North Slope people had told her that they expected 95 percent of spilled oil to be recovered during a water-based spill response. During the Deepwater Horizon response less than 10 percent of the spilled oil was actually retrieved, she said.
Social impacts Mitigation for the social impacts of an oil spill is also needed. The stresses on individual people affected by a spill can lead to elevated levels of alcohol and drug abuse, and cause people to migrate away from an area. At a community level there may be different groups of people, each with its own ways of approaching a situation. And on the North Slope an oil spill would form another stressor, on top of the existing stresses resulting from factors such as climate change and existing population migration.
The mapping of subsistence resources would be an excellent exercise for the pre-identification of those resources and the planning of possible spill mitigation measures, Kinner suggested.
Trust There is also a question of trust in disseminating information about an oil spill — people tend not to trust either industry or the government. In the case of Deepwater Horizon they tended to trust scientists, Kinner said.
However, in deciding who to trust, a person tends to compare what they are told with their own mental model, their picture of the reality of what is happening, Kinner said. Gaining people’s confidence depends in part on an understanding what these mental models are, she said.
NRDA A formal, legally specified process called natural resource damage assessment, or NRDA, also links to the human dimensions of an oil spill by setting the bar for when an area is deemed to have been restored from oil spill impacts. The NRDA process, independent from and potentially much more expensive than the oil spill response itself, involves assessing environmental damage and then preparing restoration plans, Kinner said. For a large oil spill a damage assessment is normally carried out by a group within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, with government agency “trustees” representing the interests of the wildlife when determining acceptable ways of rehabilitating or replacing resources.
A NRDA program can take many years to complete. The program for the Exxon Valdez spill, for example, is still in progress, Kinner said.
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