BALTIC SEAENVIRONMENT PROCEEDINGS No. 59 - Helcom

demands on preparedness and endurance. Those demands must rest on conclusions
of the type of threat so that they will be cost-effective, which means not to have an
expensive organisation prepared to respond to accidents which are most unlikely to
happen, but also not to have an organisation that can do nothing but still costs
money.
Together with assignments and demands on the authority it is also very important to
give the authority a satisfactory legal commission to fulfil its assignments.
Such a legal commission could consist of
- commission to use equipment and personnel from other authorities
- commission to order ” the man on the street” to serve
- commission to take possession of a building or a habour or e.g. to tell the master
of the ship involved in an accident what to & or not to do.
Of course, there must be a satisfactory correspondence between the means and the
goals.
It is also desireable that the spill response authority has sufficient manpower and
equipment to respond to minor accidents without involving resources from outside
but also to have personnel prepared to conduct personnel and other resources from
outside when dealing with a significant accident.
Anyhow, the economical system has to be of the kind that does not delay the
operation because of lack of money. One way to do this is to let the responsible
ministry pay all initial costs and afterwards claim the polluter or his insurance
company or the “Oil Pollution Compensation Fund” for the costs. This is the way we
handle these things in Sweden. The system gives us the necessary economical
possibilities to act in time but, of course, it takes time afterwards to get the money
back, in most cases more than a year.
One of the main problems when responding to accidents at sea is that an effective
response organisation is very costly. But accidents, thanks God, do not happen very
often. It is not cost-effective to have a powerful organisation doing nothing but
training and waiting for an accident. The organisation should also have other
missions to fulfil in the meantime. Such missions could e.g. be surveillance at sea,
fishery protection, customs duties and participation in environmental research at sea,
in other words an typical Coast Guard organisation. In this respect every nation has
to find its own solution, and there are almost as many different solutions as there
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