More than 50 oilfield workers took part in a daylong oil spill containment and recovery exercise on the Little Red Deer River at Westward Ho campground last week.The September 19 exercise was sponsored and conducted by Western Canadian Spill Services, which is a non-profit corporation owned and directed by upstream petroleum industry members, who pay a fee to take part in emergency response exercises.WCSS training coordinator Shannon Jarrell explained that last week's exercise involved the testing of equipment that would be used in real-life oil spill situations.“What we were doing is demonstrating an equipment deployment in a small river,” said Jarrell. “We deployed primary and secondary containment booms, as well as Pedco skimmer. We used a trolley line to deploy the primary containment boom.”During the Westward Ho exercise no oil or any other liquid was put into the river during the exercise, she noted.Participants in last week's exercise came from a number of oil and gas companies with operations in the Sundre area.In the end the exercise was worthwhile in terms of both personnel training and equipment use, she said.“We did do a debrief and we thought it was successful,” she said. “We identified some improvements that we can make to some of the equipment.”Such improvement will be made as part of an “ongoing improvement plan”, she said.Oil spill containment training is mandated by the ERCB for all oil and gas companies with field operations.WCSS maintains18 cooperatives (including in the Sundre area), each of which maintains spill contingency plans, conducts annual training exercises and strategically places oil response equipment where it can be readily accessed in the event of spills.It has specialized spill containment equipment that is available to companies that have spills. That equipment includes not only booms and skimmers, but also jet and airboats, wildlife response units and winter response equipment.Asked if last week's exercise was related in any way to the June 7 Plains Midstream oil spill on the Red Deer River, she relied, “They are related in that we had some initial spill responders from that cooperative area (Sundre area) who responded to the spill, so they would have taken some training through us.”“But this training exercise has already been preplanned, one of about 20 we do every year throughout Alberta, B.C. and Saskatchewan,” she added.About 1,500 emergency responders receive emergency spill response training by WCSS in Alberta every year.
