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Area Contingency Plan (ACP)

The Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI) has partnered with the U.S. Coast Guard to make several of the Coast Guard's Area Contingency Plans, an oil and hazardous material spill planning and response tool, digitally available on CD and the Web.

Digital ACP Regions:

Sector Saint Petersburg
South Florida
Jacksonville
Savannah, Georgia
Charleston, South Carolina

Why DIGITAL Area Contingency Plans?
In response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, the United States government quickly enacted legislation to specifically address many of the deficiencies identified in the response system at that time. The inadequacies included a lack of a unified effort between local, state, and federal stakeholders; no common defined federal, state, or local response structure; poor management of information given to the press, public, and other affected parties; and minimal information exchange between all parties. These deficiencies were addressed in the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA 90), which required the development of Area Contingency Plans (ACP) for all coastal areas of the United States through Area Committees composed of regional federal, state, and local stakeholders.

The Area Contingency Plan (ACP) was developed to address removal of oil and hazardous substances from waterways. The plan, prepared by an Area Committee, is designed to be implemented in conjunction with the National Contingency Plan (NCP)and is formatted within an Incident Command System (ICS) framework. The ICS outlines the roles and responsibilities of various agencies in response to a large-scale event such as an oil spill or terrorist attack. In addition to the ICS framework, the ACP geographically defines regional environmental and socio-economic resources that require priority protection. This planning process is necessary to reduce response lag time and help direct sometimes limited local response resources to areas of higher sensitivity. The Geographic Response Plan (GRP) is composed of a series of maps and site-specific response locations termed priority protection areas. In each location, the resources at risk and specific response strategies define each priority protection point. Within the digital ACP, these interactive maps enable planners and responders to get needed answers in a few mouse clicks. The plan’s boundaries include those areas within the jurisdiction (Area of Responsibility) of the U.S. Coast Guard's Marine Safety Office (MSO) for a region, known as the Captain of the Port (COTP) Zone.

The area contingency planning process is based on the premise that proper planning is essential to a safe and effective response. Regulatory language in OPA 90 requires that these plans be based on the best available scientific information at the time of their development. It is the Area Committee's job to enhance the response community’s ability to successfully mitigate substantial threats or actual incidents through an effective and coordinated planning process. The purpose of these plans is to define roles, responsibilities, resources, and procedures necessary to respond to a myriad of spill response possibilities. By conversion to a digital product, these plans have taken a great step forward by the integration of numerous additional reference documents, Incident Command Systems (ICS) forms, contact lists, policy letters, sensitive environmental resource data, response maps, and robust GIS projects with a myriad of planning and response data and tools. By making this information available in a user-friendly digital format to all stakeholders, a unified and coordinated response becomes much easier. It is important to note that the ACP is a plan for use in responding to an incident. Information found in these plans relating to such items as response resources should not be viewed as performance standards. These are planning criteria based on a set of assumptions that may not exist during an actual incident.

The ACP document is at the heart of the digital ACP and is generally composed of the following sections:

Section 1000 (Introduction) provides the authority and theoretical framework for the current response system in the United States.
Section 2000 (Command) discusses the Unified Command concept while detailing the staff responsibilities of the Unified Command members including Information, Safety, and Liaison positions.
Section 3000 (Operations) describes the structure and role of the Operations section, including geographic response plans, which divide the entire COTP Zone into manageable areas. The links to the maps provide much of the information necessary to identify sensitive areas and plan response operations.
Section 4000 (Planning) provides the Planning Section structure and roles while detailing required correspondence and permit and consultation procedures.
Section 5000 (Logistics) addresses the Logistics Section.
Section 6000 (Finance) details the Finance and Administration Section.
Section 7000 (Hazardous Materials) addresses Hazardous Materials response.
Section 8000 (Marine Fire Fighting) houses the Marine Fire Fighting Plan.
Section 9000 (Appendices) contains the appendices for the plan, including notification procedures, personnel and resource directories, a draft Incident Action Plan (IAP), and other relevant documentation.

To allow for consistency across the nation while still accounting for geographic differences, the design of all United States Coast Guard ACPs is based on this basic format. The format also allows for easier manipulation in a computer medium. This plan will be available for downloading in a digital format from the USCG's ACP Web site. As part of the partnering agreement with the U.S. Coast Guard, FWRI has developed an ArcIMS Internet Map Server Web site to serve the spatial elements of the Area Contingency Plans through the Internet. The IMS Web site contains four categories of data used in planning and response activities. These theme categories and examples of the types of information contained within them are as follows:

ACP Layers (site specific response and protection strategies)
Boundary Layers (COTP Zones, counties, shoreline, bathymetry, etc.)
Environmental Layers (mangroves, salt marsh, Environmental Sensitivity Index [ESI] shoreline, seagrass, primary manatee areas, etc.)
Socio-Economic Layers (marinas, boat ramps, water intake locations, roads, population density, etc.)

This Web site makes the data and mapping capabilities of the Digital ACP available to users who have no access to expensive GIS mapping software. The Web site is viewable to anyone with a newer Web browser and Internet access speed of at least 33.6 Kbps. The full content of the Area Contingency Plan, including supporting documents and interactive Geographic Response Plan maps in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) is available through the Web site.

The Fish and Wildlife Research Institute (FWRI) has partnered with the U.S. Coast Guard to make several of the Coast Guard's Area Contingency Plans (ACP), an oil and hazardous material spill planning and response tool, digitally available on CD and the Web. Regions completed and serving on the Web are: Tampa, Florida, South Florida and the Keys, Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. Jacksonville, Florida is in development and will be available soon.

Future Area Contingency Plan regions are in development and will be serving soon, so please check back frequently. For more information, please contact Richard Knudsen at FWRI. Phone: (727) 896-8626, Extension 3036. Email: Richard.Knudsen@MyFWC.com

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