Small Community Oil Spill Preparedness Research Project

Abstract

As transportation through the Arctic becomes more prevalent with tourism and oil exploration, small communities within the Arctic are susceptible to oil spills from fuel barges, passing ships, tank farms, and oily discharges. Oil spills threaten both humans and animals that co-habitat these Arctic regions. Little has been done to prepare these small communities in preparation for an oil spill and as a result they are not well protected. As the notion of globalization is incorporated into the Arctic it will be imperative to protect these small communities. To better understand this topic, the researcher took an analytical approach to identify and benchmark best practices, define the elements of preparedness, and then build the foundation for the overall project. An integral component of this research project was to build and deploy a self-assessing questionnaire to provide small communities the ability to self-assess their oil spill preparedness level. The results of the questionnaire will be used to derive a preparedness index value. The preparedness index value will be overlaid an interactive map to provide Arctic governments a better view of the level of preparedness of their small communities.