US Coast Guard conducts oil spill drill in Nome
Story and photos by Anna Lionas
This week, the United States Coast Guard organized an oil spill response drill in the Nome Harbor, bringing 20 entities together in person and virtually to act out an exercise in detail over three days.
The Mini Convention Center was abuzz with activity Tuesday morning, the site of the incident command on the second day of the drill.
Federal, state and local agencies collaborated on the exercise, defining and acting out the roles they’d take on during a real spill scenario.
“It’s a risk that all of us in Alaska have with increased maritime traffic,” USCG Arctic Coordinator Shawn Hay said. “The more we understand the problem, the more we can prepare locally to support it holistically between local, state and U.S. Coast Guard.”
The hypothetical scenario had a vessel transporting seafood in-bound for the Nome harbor and experiencing an engine explosion resulting in a fire. The scenario had the ship stranded in shallow water near the seawall on the south side of the Snake River with 150,000 gallons of fuel on board and 18 crew members.
Tuesday morning began with another debriefing of the scenario for the participants and observers of the exercise. Then it was off to the races with everyone braking off into their organize factions.
The main players were USCG, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, City of Nome, Nome Volunteer Fire Department, Local Emergency Planning Committee, Alaska Chadux and NJUS.
Groups followed the standardized Emergency Incident Command System which instructs on how to delegate tasks and cover all bases.
At the top is a unified incident command; the USCG, the DEC and the City of Nome, represented in this scenario by Charlie Lean and Tom Vaden.
Then there are branches: operations, planning, logistics, finance and safety. Those were subdivided into even more specified areas, but what’s important is the structure is universal and understood by every entity involved. In a room that can sometimes become chaotic with so many participants, the Coast Guard provided colored vests with Velcro labels like “communications” or “logistics” to differentiate who’s doing what.
Each branch would learn new information then communicate it to the proper channel, problem solving along the way.
Throughout the day, updates would come on the scenario and operations-wide debriefs would take place, like in a real scenario. This is where unified incident command asks questions about who is taking care of what and what local resources can be tapped into.
“A lot of this is finding what capabilities are out there that we don’t really think about,” Vaden said.
The last time Nome saw a drill of this size was 2016, which Hay said is too long to go between drills. This is why the drill was just as much about growing the region as well as the other entities’ ability to respond.
“Realistically, not even taking weather as an effect on travel, it would take probably 24 hours, if not more, for Coast Guard and DEC to come in with an incident management team and support the community,” Hay said.
Nomeites know this and are taking the exercise as an opportunity to build on their ability.
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The strength of Nome is that we have huge depth with our emergency managers,” Vaden said. “There’s a lot of people that have done not exercises [but] real life events, that know how to handle it.”
Nome Volunteer Fire Department Chief Jim West Jr. said it opens his eyes to what would be needed from them in a situation like this, which is at a scale they’ve never been tasked with.
While the groups work though the exercise in the Mini Convention Center, the oil spill response organization Alaska Chadux Network was at the inner harbor, deploying containment booms.
This is an exercise for them, too, though more physical, Preparedness Manager at Chadux Nate Vreeland said. Booms were first deployed in the area identified in the state Geographical Response Strategy, or GRS, just south of the Snake River bridge.
“In all reality, unless the current was really low and wind was pushing it up, there wouldn’t be much oil going up current, right? So this one we’re deploying, again,” Vreeland said.
The goal of the boom is to collect and funnel the oil to shore to one easy collection spot.
Chadux is contracted by Crowley and Bonanza Fuel to respond in the event of a spill emergency, so they have boom equipment located in Nome. But in a real-world scenario it would take about four hours for them to charter a plane and fly to Nome from the time of the initial spill.
Throughout the day many participants at incident command went to the harbor to observe the boom deployment.
The exercise concluded on Wednesday with a full debriefing of the day and conversation on lessons learned.
“We want to make sure this isn’t a one and done,” Hay said. “We definitely want our presence and our support for the community to be enduring. So this is where we reset the slate and build the new sort of up tempo, and we’re happy to do so.”