BALTIC SEAENVIRONMENT PROCEEDINGS No. 59 - Helcom

are nations.
4. Organisation of the response
Let us now, however, discuss how to organize the response.
The organisation of an authority is not the same as the organisation of the response.
The response organisation is created from the resources of the authority together
with other resources from outside, and lives only from the moment when an accident
occurs until the response is finalized.
It has its own structure which in most cases is not similar to the organisation of the
responsible authority. The responsible authority may be organized in various ways
but the principal structure of the response organisation is quite similar all over the
world. (Appendix 5).
On top there is an “Over all coordination” function (alias Response Commander,
Rescue Leader, Supreme Commander etc) where the response strategy is decided
and where all the efforts are coordinated and all necessary cooperation between all
involved is performed.
The second level (OSC) has at least two branches, one for actions on beaches and
one for actions at sea. Below the “OSC beach” there are beach cleaning
and protection teams. The “OSC sea” has to conduct and coordinate salvage,
containment, recovery and firefighting if necessary.
This principal organisation can in most cases not be used to its full extent, because
all oil spill accidents are different from each other.
By studying organograrns from various accidents it is however possible to find those
levels and functions more or less evidently.
In the “Exxon Valdez” (Appendix 6) incident, it is quite easy to recognize the
“overall coordination level” and the OSC level although they have other names (“Oil
spill operations manager” resp “Oil spill superindent”). Of course, the organisation of
the response to Exxon Valdez spill was more complicated than this organogram
indicates, depending on, inter alia, shared and unclear responsibilities.
Also the “Braer incident” (Appendix 7) shows us disagreements when compared with
the principal organisation, at least from a geographical point of view.
The MPCU (Marine Pollution Control Unit) was located in London, and the overall
command and logistic functions were kept there during the operation.
The “Joint Response Center” was established in Sumburgh Head where the airport is
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