One of the things that we have trouble dealing with as emergency managers is the slow-onset incident. This is an event that starts out so slow that no one takes it seriously until it's too late. In fairness, they're not always easy to spot and we have a built-in tendency to normalize events, so it's easy to identify the problems after the fact but hard to anticipate them during the incident.
There's a good case study playing out in the Gulf of Mexico. It hasn't got a whole lot of media play, but on Tuesday a deep-water drilling rig, the Deepwater Horizon, exploded and caught fire, killing 11 workers and injuring many others. Yesterday, it collapsed and sank. The rig is (or was) located 50 miles from New Orleans and produced over 300K gallons of crude oil a day from the seabed located 5000 feet below.
So imagine for a moment a leak that could not be capped, sending over 300K gallons of crude oil a day towards the US coastline. Did anyone consider this scenario when they heard the rig had exploded? How many days has it taken to realize and react to the potential threat?
Fortunately, the Coast Guard is reporting that oil does not appear to be leaking from the well head and the weather forecast is keeping the spill from the coast, at least for the time being. There's a lot of clean up underway for the fuel oil on the platform and the crude spilled during the explosion and fire.
Two thoughts to take away from this:
1. It's not really over yet. That's the bad thing about slow-onset events. It's easy to ignore them, particularly if you're afraid of crying. "Wolf!"
2. This is a great opportunity to activate emergency operations centers in potentially affected communities and states to develop contingency plans. Even if they are never needed, this is an opportunity to train on a real potential crisis, not just a fictional scenario. And speaking of scenarios, this is one that could be translated to other locations.
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