JULY 21, 2017--Staff from the Office of Response and Restoration attended a Mutual Aid Deployment (MAD) exercise on Alaska's North Slope oil field.

A MAD exercise is conducted annually on the North Slope with the industry host alternating from year to year. This was the first time Hilcorp Alaska hosted the MAD which included field equipment deployment, an Incident Command Center, and remote operations in Anchorage.

Emergency Response Division (ERD) staff participated in the Incident Management Team (IMT) at the command center which was established at Hilcorp's Endicott Facility on the Beaufort Sea north of Prudhoe Bay.

The IMT included Hilcorp Alaska, U.S. Coast Guard, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, and other federal, state and local responders.

Exercise components included utilizing NOAA's Environmental Response Management Application (ERMA), exercising various field tactics, conducting a polar bear response, coordinating with a Joint Information Center (JIC) in Anchorage, and exercising NRDA. Assessment and Restoration Division (ARD) led the Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) component of the drill, with a NRDA liaison at the command center at Endicott and the rest of the joint NRDA Team in Anchorage. Federal and State NRDA Trustees worked with representatives from Hilcorp to establish communication and information sharing between the Incident Management and NRDA teams and to drill a range of NRDA actions that would take place early in a spill in coordination with the emergency response.

For further information, contact Catherine.Berg@noaa.gov.

 

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