APPLICATION OF RECENT TECHNICAL ADVANCES TO THE DECISION PROCESS FOR SHORELINE TREATMENT

During the past 5 years a number of significant advances have been made in our understanding of the fate and behavior of oil on shorelines. The significance and applicability of these scientific and technical advances do not always filter into, or are recognized by, response and operations management. The key to making this information useful is to identify how this technical knowledge or understanding can be applied practically within the management of a response. The objective of this discussion is to highlight those applications. The topics discussed are (1) oil on coarse sediment beaches; (2) the natural cleaning of oil in the absence of wave energy by fine particle interactions (OFI); (3) the efficiency of some cleanup techniques; (4) the effects of cleanup or treatment on natural recovery and the application of net environmental benefit (NEB) analyses; (5) the use of standard procedures (SCAT) to systematically document oil on the shoreline and the adoption of accepted terms and definitions to describe stranded oil, and of accepted objective and strategy statements in spill management; (6) the concept of minimum regret as applied to spill movement projections; (7) the new generation of shoreline response guides and manuals that have been produced; and (8) the recent generation of computer support systems that can provide technical support to managers.