Lights on ships working offshore and in the onshore Incident Command Center (ICC) burn through the night, working their assigned tasks in the largest oil spill in history. Literally thousands of people are involved in securing and cleaning up the spill.
Life begins for the day shift around 6:00 AM and runs through the early evening hours (midnight for some). Bleary eyed and holding on to a hot cup of coffee we stagger in for our early morning briefings, group, division and tasking meeting consume the first few hours...then we are off to our sections to continue plowing through the myriad of detail necessary to make this work.
I am the aviation advisor to the Dispersant Operations Group. We have a small armada of specialized aircraft fitted to spot and spray dispersants. The aircraft are off at first light...guided by the spotters using data from electronic laden aircraft gathering data, they are sent to specific targeted areas.
The spotters, smaller twin engine aircraft, guide the larger four engine C-130’s, flying at 50 feet off the water, onto the assigned areas. Spraying the dispersant materials they fly repeated flights throughout the day.
The staging airports looks like a military operations with trucks full of fuel and dispersant meeting each arriving aircraft, refueling and re-loading dispersant they are sent back out for another run.
The ICC is full of scientist (PhD’s), rooms full, enough to start a small university. As with any group of learned folks there is the inevitable disagreements on approach, however, debate isn’t allowed to stop the process and consensus is developed faster than in most academic situation...it’s exciting to watch!
How long will it last?
Great minds and engineering talent are assembled in Houston and Houma LA working tirelessly to solve the problems and one by one they are solved.
Exactly when no one knows...so your editor will be detained, working a small part of the aviation issues...I’m the “briar patch manager”...whenever there are thorny aviation issues they throw me in.
As you have probably read / heard the BP spill has mired itself into a political morass. Our group, the aerial dispersant group (twenty aircraft ranging from C-130s, Turbine DC-3, Ag planes and a host of King Air spotters), has become the focal point of much of the controversy...."to use or not to use".
Most of the media representation is distorted and not factual...a battle we fight daily (not we but the Unified Command), bad reporting unfortunately becomes the "reality" of the day.
Example...a local reporter reported that the National Guard was throwing away spill booms....when in fact they were cleaning up the packing material it came in!!
We have over 1000 people (military, government and civilians) working in our center (24/7) to make this work and work correctly.
The aerial dispersant groups have effectively been grounded for days and the plume of oil is growing daily and beginning to impact the beaches and marshes.
Daily we are getting reports of people being "sprayed" and becoming ill...yesterday we got a call from a fishing boat 100 mile offshore saying he was being sprayed...AND we had not even take off yet!!!
There are a lot of people trying to become "spillionaires".
