Treatment and Cleanup Standards: The Development of End-Point Criteria for Oil Spills

Every oil spill response operation has an end point when treatment or cleanup is stopped. How an end point is reached involves unique decisions that reflect the individuality of each spill incident. Factors involved in the decision process include assessments of the probable environmental and socioeconomic effects of the spill, the rate of natural recovery, the effects of the various treatment or cleanup options, and the effects of increasingly more stringent criteria or standards. Other factors that influence the decision process include the roles and responsibilities of the interested parties and the perceptions of the public sector. The establishment of end-point criteria is an essential step at the outset of a spill response in order to provide a foundation for selecting appropriate treatment or cleanup strategies and tactics and for planning operations activities and logistic support. A variety of techniques can be applied to measure treatment or cleanup end points, and typically these are qualitative rather than quantitative measurements. Field analytical techniques that define the presence or absence of hydrocarbons can be used to measure a treatment end point, but this approach can be complicated if other hydrocarbon sources are present in the affected area. Chemical and toxicological data may be appropriate for damage assessment studies but it may well be impractical, or even illogical, to expect that analytical techniques can provide accurate and timely assessments for measuring the treatment or cleanup end point in all circumstances.