Spill training brings agencies to sand dunes

Grant County 5, sheriff's office receive a crash course on oil spill containment

For a day, the water that bathes the edge of the sand dunes surrounding southwest Moses Lake became a classroom of sorts for a variety of government agencies.

The Environment Response Team of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, offered a training session on how to control oil spills on bodies of water.

The purpose of the training, environmental especialist Fred Stroud said, is for different agencies, such as the Bureau of Reclamation, Grant County Fire District 5, and the Grant County Sheriff's Office, to learn how to keep oil from going further down and impacting environmental resources in waterways.

"It will help us get some experience in controlling fuel spills in bodies of water," said Rick Wentworth, battalion chief for GCFD 5. District volunteer Bobby Horst added that the training helps learning with containment resources.

Stroud added that oil spills occur more often on inland waterways than they do on the coast.

"Spills that go from one gallon to 10,000 gallons occur daily," he said. "More than 10,000 spills were reported last year."

Wentworth said that oil spills are not a constant occurrence in Grant county, although, "it is only a matter of time" until an incident of the kind happens, "and we want to be prepared if we have one."

For Stroud, just as important as the amount of oil spilled is the place where the accident happens. "Spilling five gallons could be (serious) if it is spilled on the wrong area," he said.

Wentworth said the training consisted of a day of class work and two days of field training, the first one on flat waters and the second day near the dams on Sand Dune Road, where Stroud and contractor Dick Brouphy from Tetratech, one of the companies that trained the EPA instructors in charge of the exercise, agreed the roaring waters make the deployment of equipment a bigger challenge.

Stroud added that on flat, calm currents, the purpose is to use booms in order to corral the water where the spill took place, to a point where the oil is concentrated and thick enough to pump out, and minimizing the amount of water removed. The situation in forceful currents is different.

"We are lucky if we get about 50 percent of the oil recovered," he said. "The bigger the spill, the bigger the waterway, the oil mixes into the water and onto the sediments," making it stay on the water and harder to remove.

The booms are placed in a way that, as they are towed, they can move the oily water to an area with slower currents, where some of the oil that has mixed with the sediments will return to the surface."

The key, environmental contractor Bob Rogers said, is to execute properly the placement of the booms, given that in rough waterways, once the booms are placed, "we are committed," meaning they are extremely difficult to shift position.

During Thursday's exercise, a GCSO motor boat and a number of trainees wearing mid-thigh-high boots helped put the booms in place.

Mechanical removal is the preferred method of cleaning an oil spill of these characteristics, given that applying chemicals in order to dissolve the oil is considered illegal according to federal regulations.