Oil Spill Response learns lessons from Middle East fuel spill

Bahrain – Oil Spill Response (OSR) has completed a response to a fuel oil spill in the Arabian Gulf. The spill, which occurred in early August in Kuwait, was the result of a malfunction in part of a process system. A small quantity of fuel oil spilt into the surrounding environment.

While the spill was small, the unnamed operator decided that it needed additional assistance, with OSR initially providing the services of a technical advisor to work alongside an in-house team and support decision making.

“Once we received the call I travelled from our base in Bahrain to Kuwait where I worked with our member’s in-house team to assess the spill area,” said Richard Sims, OSR’s regional manager Middle East.

“Together we concluded that additional equipment was required. As an organisation we then worked to support the in-house team, we surveyed the surrounding beaches over a 10 day period, gave guidance and recommendations on response activity and mobilised the additional equipment from Bahrain.

“We had three Oil Spill Response personnel on-site including Ali Hussan who, as an Arab national and Arabic speaker, helped hugely with communications. Our team was integrated into our member’s team to bring the total response team to just over 50 people.”

In the four years that OSR has had a base in Bahrain this is the first response incident of this nature that has required equipment to be mobilised from it. The equipment was transported across the Causeway, through Saudi Arabia and on into Kuwait.

“As a global organisation we are experienced in border crossings,: said Sims. “Different countries require equipment to be packed in different ways and documentation has to be correct but apart from differences in the time taken to cross different borders we experienced no problems at all.”

The response, which was backed by additional support from OSR’s UK and Singapore bases, is now complete and a full internal investigation into how the spill occurred has commenced.

According to Sims, a lesson learned from this response including adapting to some extreme working temperatures. For instance the temperature, at its peak, each day was around 51 degrees C.

“We couldn’t work between the hours of 12noon and 4pm because of the heat so we worked around those times to ensure the safety of the team whilst still providing an effective response.

“Whilst we were responding to the spill it was also the holy month of Ramadan. As an organisation we are very culturally aware so again we ensured that we worked in such a way as to respect Ramadan, support the team - both in-house and from Oil Spill Response - whilst getting the job done.

“The final lesson learned, or should I say re-learned, is around security. Security remains a top priority for everyone at Oil Spill Response and with planning and support our equipment and team were safe and secure at all times during the response.”