A job aid for evaluating spill countermeasures : products and technologies

The difficulty in quickly evaluating the advantages and disadvantages of varying oil spill response equipment poses a danger to many emergency response countermeasures. Regional Response Teams in the U.S. argued that they needed more information about non-conventional response technologies in order to make proactive decisions concerning their use during an oil spill response. For this reason, a job aid has been designed for easy integration into the decision process. The Spill Response Countermeasures Work Group in collaboration with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has developed a user-friendly information package to provide US On-Scene Coordinators (OSC) all information necessary to quickly evaluate product categories, individual products, and other technologies under different environmental conditions. The job aid will be equally useful to emergency response personnel working in cold water and Arctic marine environments, very small to very large spills as well as those not regulated by the U.S. National Contingency Plan. The job aid is available as a hard-copy document and will soon be produced as a web-accessible version for Regions III and IV. It will be updated regularly as new products are introduced. 6 refs., 2 tabs., 4 figs