Spill Tools: An Oil Spill Response Exercise
An oil slick has just been reported off your port city. It's estimated to be about 1 square kilometer in area, and to contain about 1,000 barrels of oil. An initial trajectory forecast shows that the slick is predicted to arrive at a nearby sensitive area within 10 hours (a sensitive area is a location especially vulnerable to harm from oiling, such as a seabird nesting area, historical site, or feeding ground where birds or wildlife congregate).
You need to decide how to allocate your response resources to remove as much of the spilled oil from the sea surface as possible before the slick reaches the sensitive site. You want to evaluate three approaches:
- applying dispersant to disperse the oil into the water column.
- using in situ burning to burn off oil from the slick.
- using skimmers to mechanically remove oil from the sea surface.
What you'll need
You'll use the Spill Tools to estimate how effective you might be, and whether you can recover all the oil before the slick reaches the sensitive area. Before you begin, review these sections, if you haven't already. |
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