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Pooling information about spill response equipment in Alaska Several organizations involved in oil spill response have agreed to share information about equipment available in the state Alan Bailey PNA Contributing Writer
Environmental concerns have led to a huge build up of oil spill response equipment in Alaska in recent years. Equipment such as boom, oil skimmers, pumps and storage tanks sit ready for action at numerous locations across the state.
Several oil spill response cooperatives and other organizations own and store this equipment. Each organization has managed its own equipment inventory using its own system of classification and nomenclature; assembling information about what equipment is available in Alaska from these disparate inventories has involved time-consuming and laborious research.
Until now, that is. Cooperative agreement In an initiative funded by the Oil Spill Recovery Institute, a group of organizations has established a cooperative agreement to use a standard computer system to store spill response equipment inventories. As a result, all of the organizations will be able to share inventory information across the Internet. Walter Cox, technical coordinator for the Oil Spill Recovery Institute, told PNA the group includes the Alaska spill response cooperatives, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy.
Cox is particularly pleased with the way such a diverse group of organizations has supported the initiative. “I really have to give the oil spill response organizations a lot of credit,” he said. “They gave up the way they were doing this part of the business and completely switched gears to go over to the (standard computer) system.” Web site E.A. Renfroe and Co. supplies the computer program that the oil spill response organizations now use to store their equipment inventories. Renfroe has also been developing a Web site that will contain an Alaska-wide equipment database, fed from the inventories of individual organizations.
A trial version of the Web site will go into operation during the first quarter of this year.
By automatically updating the Web site whenever someone changes an inventory, the computer system will ensure the Web-based inventory is continuously up to date.
“In the case of the five major (spill response) co-ops, (the computer system) is their day-to-day inventory tracking tool, so it’s part of their business,” said Don Costanzo, director of emergency response services for E.A. Renfroe and Co.
Costanzo sees the provision of a single source of spill response equipment data to be the main benefit of the initiative. “In any exercise or real incident there’s just a need to generate these resource listings,” he said. “Just from a pure transposing or managing of information, you’d have such a leg up if you could access this data.”
The easy availability of equipment inventories will also prove valuable for spill response contingency planning. “That’s typically part of the contingency plan — what are your resources, where they are, where are other resources,” Costanzo said. “It’s going to be an accurate listing (of equipment) — it’s going to be an up-to-date listing.” Consistent nomenclature Cox thinks that consistent equipment nomenclature will also become a major benefit of the initiative: the use of a standard computer system and a shared equipment database is causing organizations all to adopt the same terminology. “It forces everyone to go for a system where essentially everyone is calling an apple an apple and an orange and orange,” Cox said.
The lack of standard equipment nomenclature has plagued spill response planning, because people from one organization experience difficulty in assessing what types of equipment another organization owns. Lack of standardization also makes it difficult to assemble consolidated lists of equipment from different places.
Costanzo emphasized the value of storing the standardized data in a computer database. “Another benefit here is that you now have in a digital or computer format a single place for data and a common nomenclature,” he said. “There’s some benefit down the road for integrating it with other technologies.”
But cooperation between organizations provides the key to sharing data. Cox believes that everyone involved in the statewide equipment inventory recognizes the critical importance of working together, to ensure the availability of equipment for the protection of the Alaska environment.
“It’s really been a feather in all their caps to have been willing to cooperate to this degree,” Cox said. “I think it’s just a recognition that this is something that needed to be done and in the long term it’s going to benefit everyone.”
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