3 Common USCG OPA90 Trends the Past 18 Months
John K. Carroll III
Associate Managing Director at Witt O'Brien's, LLC, Part of the Ambipar Group
Concluding this week with my three-part series on the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA90) agency trends, I will focus on the United States Coast Guard (USCG).
If you missed the first two articles, click below:
Recent trends in plan reviews:
Trend 1 – ERAP Missing ESMs and Waste Disposal Plan: This one is more common than not and has been consistent for years. Why does this happen? In most cases, the USCG’s OPA90 requirements are jammed into an EPA facility response plan (FRP) as the EPA has more planning requirements. Under the ERAP requirements for EPA, neither one of these is noted as required.?Outside of these two items, the overall requirements are identical.
Planning note: USCG can be insistent that the ERAP follows the exact flow of their rule, so I would advise ensuring that is done upfront, as 50% of the time, this will come back on their reviews.
USCG:
§ 154.1030 General response plan contents.
Emergency response action plan:
(i) Notification procedures.
(ii) Facility's spill mitigation procedures.
(iii) Facility's response activities.
(iv) Fish and wildlife and sensitive environments.
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(v) Disposal plan.
EPA (clip from the EPA’s review checklist):
Emergency Response Action Plan (ERAP) (sec. 1.1)
Trend 2 – Discharge Documentation: When developing their average most probable discharge, maximum most probable discharge, and worst-case discharge volumes, many companies will only show the final calculated numbers and not how they were calculated. When plans show the math, it is also common to see that under the pipeline drain out volume area only to show the final volume and do not include the pipe’s length(s) and diameters(s), which makes recreating very difficult. Bottom line, USCG needs to ensure you’ve included all the correct data points and recreate to confirm math was done correctly.
Calculating these isn’t difficult; however, they can feel overwhelming if one hasn’t had much experience with them. Back in 2017, I wrote an article on how to run these calculations, click here to learn more.
Trend 3 – Booming Maps: When developing an FRP, one must conduct a vulnerability analysis. There are several steps to this, which is another article altogether. The EPA is very prescriptive here, unlike the USCG; however, one should treat them the same way and use EPA’s guidance. At a high level, one defines a planning distance and identifies areas a release could impact (e.g., water intakes, businesses, parks). Then these are noted on a map, referred to as an Environment Sensitivity Map (ESM), and one also builds a contact table to make notifications in the event of a release. Generally speaking, most stop here. Some plan developers will go one step further and roughly show on these ESMs where boom could be deployed, but with minimal context.
As we’ve seen with the EPA, USCG has started noting as a finding on their FRP reviews the need to show booming maps with enough detail to aid a responder in deploying boom. If you have ever developed an FRP, you could be thinking, ‘holy cow,’ that is a lot of work as sometimes we’re talking about over 100 miles of planning distance. In speaking with several USCG Captain of the Port (CTOP) areas, like the EPA, the expectation is not the full planning distance but the initial points. So far, in our conversations, the USCG has accepted the first two hours as the limit to these. Why did we come up with that measurement? Because in most cases, an Oil Spill Removal Organization (OSRO) can be deployed onsite in that time (remember, under OPA90, the 1-hour and 2-hour timeframes have particular and immediate equipment needs). So, what is one required to do? First, there is no correct answer here. Start by determining how far oil will travel in two hours and then locate important areas to protect by the boom. This can be done using Google maps and simply drawing lines to depict a location for the boom. One should also provide basic details on how to get to the booming site, the type of boom or other recommended equipment, and any further information to help a responder quickly prepare and deploy resources.?Several years ago, I wrote an article on how to develop tactical plans, which provided many details on how to develop these to better prepare, click here.
Here are some other items we seem from time to time; however, I would not classify them as trending:
For a complete listing of archived blogs and compliance insights, click here. Past blogs cover training requirements, clarification on additional confusing elements within the above rules, and much more.
We are here to help solve your compliance questions and challenges. Need some compliance assistance, or have a question? Please email John K. Carroll III ([email protected]) Associate Managing Director – Compliance Services or call +1 281-320-9796.