Western Australia has 12,500km of coastline, hosting more than twenty ports that are managed by port authorities and the state government. The Department for Planning and Infrastructure (DPI) facilitate the protection of Western Australia's marine environment by policing pollution laws and providing an emergency response service. The DPI also trains the users of WA waterways to improve local response to pollution events such as oil spills, and provides tools to assist in that response. One such tool is the Oil Spill Response Atlas (OSRA), which is a Geographic Information System (GIS) containing a state-wide database of coastal and marine information to aid contingency planning and decision making during marine pollution incidents. Asia-Pacific ASA has been commissioned to add another element to the OSRA: Oil Spill Risk Assessment contours for the state's ports. This will be achieved using ASA's HYDROMAP and SIMAP systems. The project has begun with a pilot study focusing on one of the state-managed ports, Port Walcott, at Cape Lambert in WA's northwest.
The contours will depict the probability of oil coming into contact with a shoreline or other socioeconomic or environmental features. This will enable the DPI and local authorities to see in advance the possible environmental risks to sensitive areas should a spill occur in a location of potential risk. Time contours will assist in depicting the rate of oil dispersion. This information will help in the response decision process, assuring cleanup procedures can be deployed within the given predicted time frame.
The spill probability contours will be included as layers in the OSRA GIS, and can be used to test the potential impacts of different spill scenarios. The inclusion of the spill probability contours in the OSRA GIS layers will enable the user to:
- Determine which sensitive features are at risk of contaminant exposure given current locations of ports, shipping channels and discharge outlets.
- Determine the risk to those sensitive features not visible to the naked eye, such as marine park boundaries, animal nesting/feeding sites and fishing zones.
- Include the position and availability of access roads, air strips, shipping channels and support vessels.
- Determine in advance the equipment that each facility would require in order to effectively respond to a spill in their locality.
- Locate nearest response resources relevant to the feature at risk.The various outcomes of "what if" queries will enable the port authorities to make advanced predictions of the impact of potential spills, and can assist in decision making processes such as locating future shipping routes, infrastructure and industry, and allocation of equipment.
The detailed model input grids, currents and winds will be made available to AMSA (Australian Maritime Safety Authority) to utilize in their real time oil spill response modeling, which currently uses ASA's OILMAP system.
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