R ESPONSE TO WEATHER WARNINGS.The National Weather Service (NWS) is responsible for issuing public warnings for all hazardous weather events across the United States. Advances in technology and basic scientific research over the years have allowed for significant improvements in this assignment. But while the NWS continues to focus much of its strategic planning toward improved warnings, most of those associated with the process are aware that there are a number of steps beyond increased accuracy to make their warnings effective. These include assuring that the target audience hears their message, understands it, believes it, and responds to it properly. One useful means of addressing these issues involves working directly with community response organizations, whose job it is to direct and allocate emergency services during catastrophic events.Often, the primary responsibility for identifying risks and managing vulnerabilities within a community is entrusted to a local emergency manager. With an emergency management system in place, disaster response can be more coordinated, flexible, and professional. However, one crucial factor in effectively managing emergencies is collaboration with organizational partners, and breakdowns in collaboration can adversely impact outcomes. In recent weather-related incidents, communications between the NWS and emergency managers have become confused. For example, in the case of the 2008 Windsor, Colorado, tornado, NWS forecasters tried to convey the urgency of a developing situation, while emergency managers awaited confirmation that a damaging event was actually underway. In that situation, it appears that emergency managers didn't entirely understand how strongly forecasters felt about the potential threat, and NWS forecasters didn't understand why emergency managers were not implementing emergency response immediately.The premise of the present study is that NWS forecasters can benefit from knowing more about their emergency management counterparts, including a general overview of the nature of that community, along with characteristics that might influence collaboration. To this end, a nationwide survey was conducted to learn more about the diversity of individual emergency managers and of the communities they serve. THE SURVEY AND ITS RESULTS.More than 3,500 invitations were e-mailed, yielding 1,062 (30.3%) completed responses from across the country. Most of the 35 questions comprising the survey were presented in a Likert-scale format. A few required more complex answers. 1 There were five categories of questions addressing such topics as personal demographics, education and experience, salary and agency funding, community settings, emergency situations, and response to a hypothetical tornado situation.Means, standard deviations, and Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated for basic demographics and are presented in Table 1a. 2 There were numerous correlations. An overview of results for the various categories follows. 1 A pdf version of the survey questions can ...
Following the April 2010 Gulf of Mexico (Macondo) oil spill and the Montara incident in Australia, the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers (OGP) formed the Global Industry Response Group. This Group identified nineteen oil spill response recommendations that are being addressed via an Oil Spill Response Joint Industry Project (OSR-JIP) during 2012-2014. The OSR-JIP is managed by IPIECA on behalf of OGP, in recognition of IPIECA’s long-standing experience with oil spill response matters One of the nineteen recommendations concerned the development of an international guideline for offshore oil spill risk assessment and a method to better relate oil spill response resources to that risk. This paper describes the development and content of the guideline, including how the oil spill risk assessment process provides structured and relevant information to oil spill response planning for offshore operations. The process starts by defining the context of the assessment and describing the activity to be assessed. Thereafter it addresses a series of key questions, such as: What can go wrong, leading to potential release of oil?What happens to the spilled oil?What are the impacts on key environmental - both ecological and socio-economic - receptors?What is the risk for environmental damage?How is the established risk utilised in oil spill response planning? The guideline draws on existing good practice in the determination of oil spill response resources. It promotes consideration, in tactical and logistical detail, of the preferred and viable response strategies to address scenarios covering the range of potential oil spills up to the most serious. The methodology to consider the scenarios follows a series of questions: What are the viable techniques/strategies to deliver response with greatest net environment benefit?What are the tactical measures required to implement the identified response strategies, considering technical, practical and safety factors?What Tiered resources are required to mount the tactical measures and achieve effective response? The paper sums up useful tools, key information and the necessary level of detail that are essential to perform an oil spill risk assessment and use this in oil spill response planning.
Following the Montara (2009) and Macondo (2010) oil spill incidents, the international oil industry has undertaken an unprecedented collective effort to apply the lessons from these and other oil spill incidents to improve the management and technical aspects of oil spill response. Over the last three years the IOGP/IPIECA Joint Industry Project (JIP) on Oil Spill Response has overseen 19 specific projects to enhance knowledge and understanding of good practice across a wide range of related technical disciplines. The legacy of this effort includes a comprehensive library of peer reviewed outputs ranging from scan/ glance technical overview products through the broad suite of 24 Good Practice Guides, and also includes a number of deep study-level technical papers and reports.The challenge today is to inculcate this vast body of technical guidance into the awareness of decision makers through a coordinated programme of communication and outreach. The overarching aim is to raise levels of knowledge and understanding relating to the tools and techniques of oil spill response amongst opinion formers and decision-makers. In so doing, industry can overcome barriers that currently restrict / prevent access to use all available response tools, based on a scientific assessment of the most appropriate response strategies.Oil Spill Response Limited (OSRL) is working with industry on initiatives designed to socialise these outputs within a broad range of stakeholders. Key steps on this journey include:Stakeholder Mapping: understanding the organisations where exposure to the new suite of technical outputs will offer the greatest strategic reward. OSRL has analysed a wide range of stakeholder organisations and rated them according to their respective influence to differentiate organisations that only require a passive awareness from those where coordinated engagement offers the greatest opportunity to influence decision makers. Influence Multipliers: Seeding knowledge and understanding from within, through expanding the network of technical experts and advocates from within Oil Spill Response Organisations (OSROs) and other aligned organisations in the responder community. This strategy can also be used by member oil companies of OSRL and the JIP to reach deeper into these organisations to where oil spill response is not a core discipline.Leverage existing forums: Ensure the JIP outputs are firmly embedded in the activities of the IMO / IPIECA Global Initiative (GI) and also make more effective use of national and regional oil industry associations and other response community networks to give appropriate exposure to the JIP outputs. This paper will discuss each of these ongoing initiatives and will highlight the successes that have been achieved and the challenges that remain.
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