A Guide to Response Evaluation for Oil Spill Combat in Japan

ABSTRACT There are many ways to evaluate the overall performance of an oil spill response operation. There is, or there should be, however, a common standpoint for looking at such operations, irrespective of the size of the spill. Lessons learned through an incident, however trivial, can provide valuable clues to the future improvement of the operation in refineries and oil terminals. But the number of incidents at one location is too few to stand the test of analysis. Evaluation by a variety of methods is now possible based on information and data available through the worldwide news and reporting networks. This paper presents a guideline, which is widely accepted by the Japanese oil industry, for evaluating responses to oil spills, and introduces a concise equation based on the rating of many response elements.