Contingency Issues and Management

Oil Spills are generally considered to fall into two categories:

1.      Operational

2.      Environmental

You have already addressed Operational issues above. Now you must look at contingencies around an environmental incident.

Contingency Planning

Identifying Strategic Focal Points
Begin by identifying Strategic Focal Points in the context of your entire infrastructure. If you have already identified the Assets and Liabilities of your company, you probably have a good roadmap of priorities established. Review this and make changes as appropriate. 

In this area we are attempting to assess what are the zones or areas where an environmental spill or a fire is possible. Begin with those areas that are of the highest priority and the greatest liability to both operations and your company reputation. Work down from there setting up a priority system. This does several important things for you. Right from the beginning you have a defacto triage system for prioritizing your efforts because you have identified the focal points in terms of their importance and the peril they may create for your company and the environment.It also points you to other priority areas so that if an accident occurs you will know what other aspects of your operations to secure first to prevent the accident from involving other operational areas.

At each of the focal points identify the following:

1. How the spill might occur
2. What resources will be needed to repair the problem?
3. What resources will be needed to aggressively attack the environmental spill?
4. What systems do you need to have in place for rapid containment?
5. How will the containment be achieve?
6. What products do you need to have strategically placed to achieve containment?
7. Who will be in charge of each aspect of the response?
8. Who will be in the secondary position?
   It is better to do this by job title than by individual in case an individual is off duty but as long as you have a backup identified it is possible to assign individuals.

Green Your Approach
Once you have identified your focal points and determined what kinds of products and approaches you will be using to contain and clean up a spill, or to suppress a fire, you can begin to look at the range of products that are environmentally friendly alternatives to meet the challenge. The importance of this relates to both Operational/Contingency costs and human costs. Again, be aware that the cost of cleanup and containment products need to be measured by their real costs which includes disposal. In many cases you will find that using sustainable products will simply be more cost effective when you examine the full real costs.The classic case of this is polypropylene which has a very low acquisition cost and a very high disposal cost because it must be disposed as a hazardous waste.

However, in other instances, you will often find that the benefits to your reputation will far outweigh the extra cost associated with purchasing environmentally friendly products.