Oil tanker collision reinforces rapid response
A near miss on another oil spill in our beautiful Bay as an empty oil tanker scraped one of the fenders protecting a tower of the Bay Bridge on Monday. Fortunately, the hull was not ruptured and no contamination took place.
What was interesting was the rapid reaction from all the agencies responsible for dealing with this type of event. Federal, state and local resources were dispatched immediately to the scene to make sure that any potential spill was contained. This is in stark contrast to the Cosco Busan incident in 2007 that spilled 53,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the Bay. All agencies were roundly critized for a slow and uncoordinated response.
There's nothing like a real event to test your plans and show up weaknesses. I can generally tell the level of experience of an emergency manager by his or her willingness to activate their response organization. People new to the profession wonder if they'll get into trouble for activating without a good enough reason. Experienced professionals know that if you even think you need to activate, you do it. It is easier to stand down an organization than to try to activate it after a crisis has gotten away from you.
We've also learned to take advantage of these false starts. You get to test notification systems and hazard assessment processes at a minimum. If it looks like you'll be standing down, run a short tabletop exercise based on "what if this had been worse" scenarios. One of my favorites was to take a worse case scenario and ask my team to identify what would have been our top three operational priorities, a twenty minute or so exercise that paid tremendous dividends in real events.
So the next time you're unsure about activating your team, do it!