5
Closing Plenary: “What Just Happened?”
In his closing remarks on Day 3, Admiral Thad Allen (U.S. Coast Guard, retired) complimented the Gulf Research Program (GRP) on a successful event, stating that “this is the most comprehensive look at this problem set that I’ve seen in my entire career, especially since the Deepwater Horizon spill.”
Admiral Allen commended the Offshore Situation Room (OSR) participants on the “substantial, important, consequential, and meaningful” body of work they had generated over the past 3 days, and encouraged the GRP to share the event’s key takeaways broadly, including to the National Response Team, the National Ocean Industries Association, and the National Security Council.
Admiral Allen reasserted the critical challenge that complexity presents as a potential risk aggravator:
What you have to do when you’re managing one of these things is to figure out what needs to be done. If you lack the authority, the resources to do it, how do you actually make it happen if it’s required for the response, and what’s expected by the American people of a whole-of-government response is not covered under OPA 90 [Oil Pollution Act of 1990] or under the Stafford Act … or under the rules and regulations that are out there?
Admiral Allen provided three relevant examples from the Deepwater Horizon disaster:
- Because fishing was shut down, a charter boat captain was put out of business and committed suicide. Current legislation and authorization appropriations in the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund were insufficient to address the immediate outcry that followed about community and mental health.
- Occupational Safety and Health Administration limits for exposure to volatile organic compounds were insufficient to protect responders in this situation, leading Admiral Allen to issue a National Incident Commander order unilaterally lowering the exposure limit requiring personal protective equipment.
- When dealing with seafood safety, Admiral Allen confronted managing a process complicated by overlaps in jurisdictional authority among the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
To help tackle difficult issues requiring interagency collaboration, Admiral Allen created an ad hoc Interagency Solutions Group, which he described as “a skunkworks” project. The questions he posed to OSR participants immediately afterward were as follows:
How do you institutionalize that and make it part of the doctrine moving forward? … Can you change the National Contingency Plan by fiat under existing jurisdiction and regulations? And how much space do you have to make that happen without having to go through some formal process?
Admiral Allen once again cautioned against waiting for legislation and regulations, given challenges with their timeliness. Instead, he counseled using public-private partnerships to drive change even in the absence of legislation or regulations. Admiral Allen also touched on the topic of oil spill research and development (R&D). He made two specific points: “First of all, the worst time to do oil spill R&D is during an oil spill.” Second, he noted that although a very robust R&D process was set up after OPA 90, it eventually lost budget support and went away. This led him to pose the question, “How do you sustain long-term innovation research and bring these new tools … and keep them in front of everybody so they’re available when you need them?”
At different points in his closing plenary and during the question-and-answer discussion that followed, Admiral Allen addressed the question of how to move forward from OSR. As a next step, he suggested compiling a
list of the actions identified and reviewing each action against a common set of questions:
- Can this be fixed only with legislation, or does it require regulation?
- Can agencies act on it within their current statutory authority?
- Is this a matter of community outreach?
- Can it be done without resources but through outreach?
- Can you do it through communications, where you are not waiting for resources?
Answering these questions would assist in identifying the lowest-hanging fruit among the actions, including those that could be accomplished by a policy or doctrinal change under existing statutory and regulatory authorities. Finally, Admiral Allen cautioned that “if you don’t address these things up front or have a way to deal with them, political leaders, in order to be relevant, will call an audible.”
QUESTION-AND-ANSWER DISCUSSION
A brief question-and-answer discussion with Admiral Allen followed his closing plenary. A participant probed Admiral Allen for his ideas on how best to engage government officials at all levels in planning activities prior to a spill. He pointed to challenges at both local and federal levels, in which politically elected officials or appointees suddenly step in during an oil spill, take charge, and ignore past lessons learned and existing plans. In response to these comments, Admiral Allen relayed a couple of anecdotes highlighting the importance of holding elected officials accountable and getting them involved. For example, while serving as the Captain of the Port Long Island Sound, he made sure to obtain buy-in, especially on pre-approvals for in situ burning and dispersant use. He noted that “maybe it’s time to double down and go down deeper into the communities and start talking about some of the communication issues, because it’s most effectively done at the area committee level, in my opinion.”1
Another participant asked how to keep oil spill removal organizations (OSROs) invigorated so that they are available when needed. Admiral Allen noted that the requirements for OSROs are only as good as the exercises holding them accountable. He also expressed significant concerns about
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1 For example, the Gulf of Mexico Area Maritime Security Advisory Committee.
the meaningfulness of the national inventory of spill response equipment, highlighting potential issues with double counting and multiple response plans relying on the same equipment. From his viewpoint:
This stuff has to be directed—part of the exercise program and the standard. And the more the standby requirements are enforced, the more they will capitalize on the standby because it’s a condition of operations [that] they’ll get paid for and that should be included in the price. The problem is that there’s an externality creeping in here where there’s no incentive for the OSROs to be where they need to be. I think there’s a real readiness issue.
In the next question, a participant asked “What do you think is the best way of identifying and keeping track of who the real experts are in [a] given area, so that when there is an emergency, a person with a job like you had can … quickly call the right people, not just the usual people, and get real help?” Admiral Allen suggested the possibility of including a technical advisory group that could be activated within the Incident Command System and be available as an on-call away team. These individuals would need to be independent and credible; their basic message must be, “Here is what the science says.” Later on in the Q&A, Admiral Allen also addressed the possibility of creating multidisciplinary teams to assist with decisions:
When we were looking at how clean is clean … we created an entity called a shoreline assessment team.… It’s a multidisciplinary bunch of folks that go down to the beaches and … tell you what needs to be done where and what order you need to do it in. If you take a doctrinal cue from them, I don’t know why we couldn’t create multidisciplinary teams that can be brought in with a specific purpose to help us make a decision.
In addition to shoreline assessment teams, he noted that other teams might be created for seafood safety, air quality, and human health. More broadly, Admiral Allen thought the creation of these teams was “made to order” for an adjustment to the National Contingency Plan and response doctrine. Later on, he would add, “you don’t need a rule change to do this.… You need to write it into the actual response doctrine … until somebody tells [you], you can’t.”
