SEARSPORT, Maine — Dozens of people swarmed Sears Island Thursday morning to practice what they would do if they are ever called on to respond to an oil spill on the coast of Maine.
The mock oil spill drill, organized by Don Katnik of the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, is the first field exercise done by the department in several years. Altogether, about 40 people spent about four hours working through the scenario he had imagined, with a focus on saving oil-covered seabirds — represented on Sears Island by a motley assortment of stuffed animals he had rescued from the Hampden Transfer Station.
“I thought it went really well,” he said later Thursday afternoon. “We got done a lot faster than I thought. We had a lot more people show up than I was expecting. I think everybody felt they had a good exercise. I think I probably learned more than anybody, trying to organize that many people, in an event that’s really pretty complex. [As oil spill response coordinator at IF&W], I’m the only person in the department who thinks about oil spill response on a daily basis. It’s really good for me to put all this into play.”
Katnik said he chose Sears Island because it is conveniently connected to the mainland by a causeway, because it is uninhabited and because it’s close to U.S. Route 1 and to Bangor. In his scenario, a small vessel ran aground at low tide and broke apart, and even though a boom was placed around the spilled oil, the boom failed. That left an imagined 200 or 300 gallons of diesel fuel wreaking havoc in the water and on the shore of the island.
“One of the things about spills in general is that we usually think of how many gallons we’re dealing with,” Katnik said. “But from a wildlife perspective, a very small amount of oil can just be catastrophic, if it goes to the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The responders were largely made up of personnel from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, but included some members of the U.S. Coast Guard, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and even a couple of volunteers.
Katnik said that he did not deploy actual booms in the exercise, which he characterized as a small-to-medium-sized mock oil spill. Still, the act of walking the shoreline for the stuffed animals made the drill a lot more lifelike, and hopefully helpful, than the classroom exercises that take place most years.
“I wanted everybody to have real-life experience with what they were doing in this spill response,” he said. “It’s one thing to talk about it. But when you actually put on the Tyvek suit and you’re walking the beaches and recovering things, that real world experience is just invaluable.”