Industry Led Multi-Jurisdiction, Multi-Event Exercise

Abstract

Abstract Marathon Oil gets its Corporate Emergency Response Team (CERT) together once a year in a tabletop exercise. CERT is made up of volunteers from throughout the company and the exercise serves both to hone response skills and to build teamwork. The 2009 annual exercise was held in Huntington, West Virginia. The exercise involved a diesel leak in Ohio, a worst case discharge of crude oil in Kentucky and a barge/security incident in West Virginia. These incidents pulled in responders from 3 United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) regions, the United States Coast Guard (USCG), West Virginia National Guard, 3 states, 4 counties and 3 business units. In all 280 people from 26 organizations were involved in the drill. The planning effort involved many of the organizations who played in the exercise and was modeled after the Spill of National Significance (SONS1) 2007 planning effort for the Evansville Venue which built from the bottom up. Major goals of the drill were to: deeply integrate Unified Command, and stress the CERT with both traditional and nontraditional problems. The endgame was the delivery of an Incident Action Plan (IAP) which included the company's first attempt at an inland salvage plan. Unified Command was pushed down into Operations, Planning, Environmental and Joint Information. Integration in Unified Command was done in several ways: traditional jurisdictional decision making, position/task assignments, and resource pooling. A Joint Information Center (JIC) was setup for the exercise, and one of the JIC's tasks was to accommodate real media coverage. A group hotwash was held for all participants and even though 100 action items were identified, the group consensus was that the drill was valuable for both public and private responders, and their organizations.