The oil from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico was documented by shoreline assessment teams as stranding on 1,773 km of shoreline. Beaches comprised 50.8%, marshes 44.9%, and other shoreline types 4.3% of the oiled shoreline. Shoreline cleanup activities were authorized on 660 km, or 73.3% of oiled beaches and up to 71 km, or 8.9% of oiled marshes and associated habitats. One year after the spill began, oil remained on 847 km; two years later, oil remained on 687 km, though at much lesser degrees of oiling. For example, shorelines characterized as heavily oiled went from a maximum of 360 km, to 22.4 km one year later, and to 6.4 km two years later. Shoreline cleanup has been conducted to meet habitat-specific cleanup endpoints and will continue until all oiled shoreline segments meet endpoints. The entire shoreline cleanup program has been managed under the Shoreline Cleanup Assessment Technique (SCAT) Program, which is a systematic, objective, and inclusive process to collect data on shoreline oiling conditions and support decision making on appropriate cleanup methods and endpoints. It was a particularly valuable and effective process during such a complex spill.

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The effectiveness of spill response organizations to handle incidents much depends on the use of well trained personnel and specialized equipment. Knowing where equipment is located, and ensuring that it is ready to use and in good working order are both vital to the planning and management of a response. It is with these goals and concerns that the Eastern Canada Response Corporation (ECRC) recently decided to update its computerized equipment inventory and maintenance system. An analysis showed that commercially equipment maintenance support systems were not well adapted to the general maintenance processes and tasks used within the organization, were too complex and were not flexible enough. For this reason, an entirely new system was created to support the management of equipment maintenance. The system was developed using Microsoft Access, with a file server architecture allowing many users to access each of 6 regionally maintained equipment databases. A simple internet based mechanism was developed to enable merging of each of the database for consultation for inventory purposes. Some of the functions included:– Support for the planning of each of 4 types of maintenance, including preventive, license renewal, safety inspections and enhancements or repairs;– A simple mechanism allowing the user to indicate that a piece of equipment is located within another piece of equipment.– The capacity to associate lists of accessories to pieces of equipment– Storage and retrieval of predefined maintenance processes description Support was also provided to the planning of equipment repair or enhancements through the production of itemized and dated tasks lists. Some other additional features included: the management of equipment names, to prevent proliferation of names for essentially similar pieces of equipment; the inclusion of a “query-by-example” mechanism for equipment search; and the capacity to export any or all data to a spreadsheet, in order to enable flexible analysis and planning. The system was also designed in a way to make it easy to upgrade to a database server architecture, should the need arise. The approach used for the system development and implementation would be applicable to any small to medium size response organization.

Approximately 300 kilometers of the coast of Oregon were surveyed following the spill from the New Carissa and a long-term observation program focused on the documentation of stranded tarballs in the vicinity of the spill site. Field documentation methods applied to shoreline oiling after the spill in February 1999 initially followed standard SCAT reporting procedures. After a brief period of relatively heavy oiling, most of the stranded oil took the form of oil pellets of various sizes (“tarballs”). As the amounts of oil on the shoreline diminished, the standard SCAT method resulted in evaluations of oil quantities that were invariably too high. Field observations were conducted for a year after the incident and the data presented in this discussion cover tarball observations in two segments adjacent to the accident site and at two distant locations over the period March 1999 to June 2000. Data output from the study included maps, tables, and histograms of stranded tarball volumes and concentrations (gm/m2). The semi-logarithmic scale time-series plots of the tarball concentration proved the most useful format for identifying trends, as the data spanned as many as nine orders of magnitude. When plotted on conventional histogram, only the larger values can be identified and smaller trends are masked in the time series. Long-term (> 1 year) data on the monthly median tarball size and the monthly tarball volume are provided for four sites.