Preventing Another Oil Spill Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico: Offshore Situation Room Convenes Experts to Share Lessons, Future Actions

Eleven years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, oil spill recovery and response have grown evermore complex — given the challenges of stronger hurricanes and other extreme weather events and the nation’s aging infrastructure. For instance, after Hurricane Ida made landfall in August, there were hundreds of reported oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, many of them coming from abandoned pipelines. And in early October, a pipeline leak sent tens of thousands of gallons of oil gushing into the ocean off the coast of Orange County, California.

“Whether it’s natural or man-made, all disasters are really exercises in applied civics,” said Thad Allen, retired admiral, U.S. Coast Guard, who was national incident commander for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response and served as keynote speaker for the OSR event.

Disasters test the ability of our national and local governance and legal frameworks to unify around an objective, he added. However, Allen cautioned against waiting for legislation or regulations to enact change, especially in areas such as oil spill research and development.

“The worst time to do oil spill R&D is during an oil spill,” Allen said.

A central discussion topic was the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which established a robust R&D process for safety and prevention. Absent a disaster, though, R&D eventually lost its budget. Without lasting, preventive policy levers, OSR participants said, it is challenging to sustain long-term, innovative research and produce new tools and technologies — and to make sure they are available in times of crisis. Allen and other OSR participants emphasized that public-private partnerships are essential for driving innovation in the absence of legislation or regulations.

“Disasters test whether we are taking care of people and communities,” said Allen.

There are environmental consequences, but it is also important to consider consequences that affect people’s everyday lives, including the loss of cultural institutions, the mental health outcry, and food safety issues, participants noted.

Allen pointed out that mental health resources were relatively scarce in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon response. Participants suggested several actions for the next disaster, such as providing dedicated counseling and mental health services post-disaster, and ensuring community organizations have training and resources to provide mental health services.

During the “needs and planning” game, participant Patrick Barnes, president and CEO of BFA Environmental Consultants, led a discussion about how to better incorporate environmental justice principles in oil spill response.

“Because of the urgency associated with emergencies, and the need to do something quickly, things happen to [disenfranchised] communities, and they do not have a voice,” said Barnes.

OSR participants identified several actions to engage local community members in preparedness and response. These included working with local colleges and minority-serving institutions to ensure oil spill and social science is part of the curriculum; creating multilingual public awareness campaigns about oil spill impacts and resources; providing support for understanding and accessing post-spill compensation (claims) processes; and working with local conservation corps.

A prominent theme throughout OSR was that all stakeholders should be communicating before an incident happens. Getting the right people in the room, at forums like OSR, is essential to starting the conversation. The ideas generated at OSR will inform the Gulf Research Program’s future work, and initiate a community of interest that can foster solutions to future challenges in offshore energy.

“The three days took these different cross-cuts through the problem by dissecting the problem into its pieces — preparedness, response, restoration — and then also dissecting [it] by different communities and different aspects of their expertise, whether it be engineering, technology, or regulation,” said Lauren Alexander Augustine, the Gulf Research Program’s executive director.

As Alexander Augustine noted, despite participants approaching challenges from different points of view and experiences, “We are all in this together.”

• Video — Overview and Summary of the Offshore Situation Room
• Offshore Situation Room: Enhancing Resilience to Offshore Oil Disasters in the Gulf of Mexico — Proceedings of a Workshop