Branch-Level Planning during a Spill of National Significance: A Best Practice from the MC-252 Incident

Abstract

ABSTRACT Following the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 required that the National Contingency Plan be amended to include procedures for the response to a Spill of National Significance (SONS). Although SONS exercises were conducted over the last 20 years, no actual SONS occurred until the explosion of the MC-252 well in the Gulf of Mexico caused the largest oil spill in United States history in April of 2010. The MC-252 event showed that, although the United States government and industry had planned for a SONS, the full breadth of such a large-scale event was greater than anyone could have ever predicted. Although the National Incident Management System (NIMS) Incident Command System (ICS) structure was fully implemented, the scale of the response required the creation of new, innovative procedures outside of any planning that had occurred for a spill of this size. One of these procedures was the implementation of Branch-level Planning. In the Incident Command Post (ICP) Mob...