Deepwater Horizon, BP Oil Spill: Coast Guard Response – Then and Now

By J.R. Wilson - July 25, 2012

An April 21, 2010, aerial photo shows oil in the Gulf of Mexico, more than 50 miles southeast of Venice, La., as the Deepwater Horizon oil rig burns. The oil platform, which burned for more than a day after a massive explosion, sank into the Gulf on April 22, 2010. The resulting environmental emergency far surpassed the spillage of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska. An estimated 60,000 barrels of oil gushed each day for 87 days, making the Deepwater Horizon spill and its response unprecedented. As a result, the Coast Guard’s role expanded under the National Contingency Plan and called for the service to direct all response efforts to contain and clean up the oil spill. AP photo/Gerald Herbert

The actual shoreline affected turned out to be only a quarter of the original survey, but still massive at 1,100 miles. After two years of effort, less than 400 miles remain involved. Some of that is being actively cleaned, and some is in SCAT monitoring or some stage of inspection. But while smaller, the remaining areas were the most heavily impacted or the most technically difficult to clean.

While dozens of reports have been written by and for the hundreds of agencies involved in Deepwater Horizon, Thomas said Coast Guard internal reports alone identified some 250 strategic “higher order of magnitude” lessons learned, along with thousands of smaller ones.

Those were assigned to five categories: strategic communications, information management, incident management, mission support to sustain Coast Guard personnel, and institutionalizing the process of lessons learned.

“Now we have narrowed the 250 lessons down to about 50 action items we have embarked on efforts to improve. Many of those already have been done and we’re making good progress on the rest,” she said.

“Meanwhile, a significant portion of our at-sea capability that provided critical command, control, and communications during [the] Deepwater Horizon response is in the process of being modernized. The plan calls for eight national security cutters, 58 fast response cutters, and we are in the process of getting out to industry for bids on proposals for new offshore patrol craft. When this is done, the Coast Guard will be very capable. But for now, we have some real problems with cutter reliability.”

The great demand in the Gulf for limited Coast Guard and partner-agency resources, from boom and skimmers to equipment needed to cap a well deep underwater, also has led to an effort to expand the response resource inventory catalog of equipment available from oil spill removal organizations (OSROs) around the country. In some cases, the IMT found that the equipment needed for the response did not belong to an OSRO, but to a university or private company not listed in the catalog.

“So we are working to broaden the scope of the inventory to truly understand what is in our national capacity to respond to a disaster and assess the impacts of bringing equipment from one area of the country into the spill location,” Thomas said. “Dealing with that is not easy and it will be another year or so before we bring the new cataloging concept to closure.”

Deepwater Horizon also emphasized the need to include insurance companies and various private institutions that can help support, along with volunteers and local authorities and citizens.

“We also will be interacting more with local communities about plan development,” she added. “With offshore drilling off the north coast of Alaska, the regional commander has taken the interagency plans to small towns there to give them an understanding of what we might do, such as booming off one area to protect endangered habitats or a strategy on which areas to deal with in what order.”

Direct experiences such as this in the Gulf are not the only source the Coast Guard is turning to for ideas to improve incident response. These include best practices among other types of first responders, such as the agreements firefighters and power companies have in place to deal with power needs after hurricanes or tornadoes.

“Structurally, our response priorities would be similar for all types of incidents – we need to get there as fast as we can, minimize the impact to the environment, consider the economic factors, and operate safely. The real difference is distance and currents,” Thomas concluded. “Even away from coastal waters, there are well-established procedures already in place in our OSROs, with requirements for vessels that travel [inland] and a lot of pre-staged equipment capability.”

This article was first published in Coast Guard Outlook: Summer 2012 Edition.