Lessons from the gulf

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There are many lessons that should have been learned from the events surrounding the BP/Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010. Those lessons can inform Ohio as we rush to develop our shale oil and gas resources. Today, I'll focus on just one lesson, emergency preparedness and planning, and I'll hope to return to some others in a future post.
Clearly, the blowout in the Gulf shouldn't have happened. Government agencies have written thousands of pages in efforts to understand why it happened. Regardless, it was a known possibility, and although hindsight is always 20/20, it was arguably predictable based on available knowledge of the risks of blowouts caused by pressure problems in the wells.
Pressure problems can result in oil, gas, drilling mud or water escaping into parts of the well bore or drilling pipe — a phenomenon that drillers call “kicks.” The Macondo well had experienced several kicks not long before a subsequent kick indicated the devastating blowout. Perhaps it should have been expected. But even if not, accidents happen and we need to be prepared for them, especially when the stakes are so high.
Clearly, the stakes were high in the gulf, but the stakes are also high around Ohio's shale operations. In the gulf, the quality of planning and preparedness for disaster was shameful. I hope that by focusing on that lack of planning and its disastrous result in the gulf, we can encourage the relevant agencies, organizations, businesses, and lawmakers at work in Ohio to do a better job of emergency planning and preparedness for our state. If the shale industry succeeds here, there will be more oil and gas flowing than the state has ever seen.
Federal law required an emergency response plan for deep water rigs, but because BP had calculated its “worst case scenario” to be lower than the threshold level required to trigger a site-specific emergency response plan, no such plan was required or created. (There was a 52-page section of BP's regional plan that focused on the Deepwater Horizon, but it was vague and unspecific regarding response procedures for the rig.)
If there had been a site-specific emergency response plan, the plan would have specifically directed rig personnel to precise procedures for handling the eventual spill. Instead, the company was allowed to submit a more generic plan for the Gulf of Mexico region, in which it was operating approximately 70 wells and held hundreds of leases.
BP's entire 582-page Gulf Oil Response Plan for the Gulf of Mexico region was not specific to any rig, and had bits copied from plans written for drilling operations in Alaska. This is a well-known fact. It referred to walruses, which live near BP's Alaskan operations, but not anywhere near the Gulf of Mexico. It included nonfunctional contact information, apparently copied from older reports.
The plan, to the extent it pertained to the gulf region, rather than the coast of Alaska, relied on local resources — local fire response, local boats, stores of berms, and so forth. But it ultimately turned out that there were not enough boats on the ground (or in the water) and the operators of those boats were not specifically trained for a disaster of the magnitude that occurred. There weren't enough berms or booms, and the chemical oil dispersants were not easily accessible.
Coordination between and among drillers, regulators, and responders was, at least at first, uncoordinated. When disaster did strike, emergency plans and preparedness proved insufficient.
In Ohio, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, which has “sole and exclusive authority” to regulate oil and gas drilling operations, does not require specific emergency plans for those operations. To aid emergency crews, however, Ohio DNR maintains a website designed “to allow emergency response personnel to find well locations and detailed well information, as well as contacts and phone numbers for emergency situations.”
According to the site, its purpose is to “improve response times to oil and gas well emergencies by oil and gas well owners, state regulatory personnel and local emergency responders to reduce public health and environmental risks, facilitate full compliance with spill reporting requirements, eliminate burdensome Community-Right-To-Know paper reporting requirements while providing a more efficient, convenient and comprehensive information system for local officials.”
This is helpful, for sure, but it is not a site-specific, well-planned emergency response plan.
The federal Spill Prevention Control and Countermeasure (SPCC) program also pertains to emergency response planning for oil and gas handlers in Ohio. Because Ohio has not created its own SPCC rules, facilities in the state that are subject to SPCC requirements must satisfy the federal rules. SPCC rules specifically include oil drilling, production, and refining facilities, and require them to prepare an emergency plan if, due to the facility's location, a spill could reasonably be expected to reach a waterway or sewer.
Plans must be written to show how a facility would control a spill, including, for example, a written commitment of manpower, equipment and materials to expeditiously control and remove any amount of oil that may be spilled. These rules would apply to many Ohio shale operations.
Still, although Ohio EPA's Division of Emergency and Remedial Response is responsible for conducting investigations on behalf of the federal SPCC program, the agency does not actually approve SPCC plans. Rather, the facility, itself, verifies through a management sign-off that its SPCC plan is properly implemented and meets the federal requirements. To reiterate, the rules require the facility to prepare a plan, but they do not require that any regulator approve it, or even read it.
These plans, assuming that they exist and that they are well-prepared, forward-thinking, risk-averse, accessible, and well-communicated to those responsible for implementation, are a good thing. It would have been better, in the gulf, if emergency plans had been site-specific, reviewed and implemented.
Ohio should learn from this example. It should require site-specific plans that accurately evaluate risk, identify response procedures, verify the training and availability of local response resources, and communicate with those who are depended upon for response.
Even if Ohio fails to institute a system of site-specific emergency planning, it should work on formal coordination of emergency planning and response efforts. To my knowledge, there has been little, if any, coordination of emergency planning among Ohio DNR, Ohio EPA, drillers and local emergency responders. Groups of county engineers have developed and entered into agreements to require drilling companies to repair county roads. Ohio would benefit from similar coordination in efforts to prepare and plan for emergencies.
(Heidi Gorovitz Robertson is professor of law and associate dean for academic enrichment at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and professor of environmental studies at the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.)