Drill, baby drill
Preparedness is the ancient art of keeping your assets in a crisis
It’s impossible to pick up any maritime newspaper or magazine, or surf the myriad excellent websites offering business news, without reading about the 'oil spill'.
Certainly, ports in the region have been on the front lines; but, for the most part, deep sea shipping has been continuing to move in and out of ports on the lower Mississippi River, and around Mobile, Alabama.
The broader message is about preparedness. Local ports will face local crisis (hopefully infrequently, or never), and it’s important to drill, baby, drill - with the word “drill” used synonymously with “practice”, or “review”, rather than punching holes in the earth.
The more opinionated pundits - led by loyalists to George W Bush - have labeled the BP spill as 'Obama’s version of Hurricane Katrina'. A commonality in both disasters is that implementation of response plans came too slowly, in retrospect. And, like Katrina, various versions of inter-agency conflicts and unclear (and untested) lines of authority in the face of a “worst case” situation are now becoming apparent after the fact.
The mechanisms for organising responses to 'worst case' scenarios are already in place. Ports around the country gather stakeholder committees dealing with harbour safety and with harbour security, usually on a monthly basis. Once in a while, exercises simulating some type of incident (usually an oil spill, but sometimes a terrorist event) are held.
It’s worth mentioning that the safety and security committees with the Port of New York & New Jersey, under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, organised a mid-June conference, bringing together their counterparts from all over the country. The conference agenda was all about sharing best practices, and about getting safety and security into alignment, addressing the challenges of multiple government agencies working together.
Advanced planning, for whatever might happen, is paramount.
But planning is only the first step. Port management, Coast Guard, and commercial port users, should be constantly “drilling” to practice quick and effective responses to situations that start small, but could have the potential, however unlikely, to rapidly spiral out of control.
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