Kodiak Potential Places of Refuge
Leaking or disabled vessels may require a sheltered location with adequate water depth to repair or lighter the vessel in order to minimize the amount of spilled product. If disabled vessels are not repaired, oil or other hazardous substances released from the vessel can impact downstream environmental resources and shoreline. Vessels should be anchored or moored in protected waters to safely undergo repairs and minimize polluting the environment.

In 2006, Cook Inlet RCAC partnered with agency, industry, and community stakeholders to develop the Kodiak Potential Places of Refuge project to identify places where a stricken vessel may best find shelter. Once identified, suitable emergency mooring locations are included in the Kodiak Subarea Contingency Plan.

Kodiak has some of the most environmentally sensitive coastal areas in Alaska. In addition to sensitive shoreline habitats such as marshes, sheltered tidal flats, and exposed tidal flats, Kodiak supports a number of sensitive biological resources including birds, fish and shellfish, and marine mammals. The area contains national refuges, national parks, state critical habitat areas, state parks, native and other private lands, and is managed for a variety of uses. Kodiak is also widely used for marine commerce and has significant traffic passing nearby en route to other ports. As international trade and development of Alaska’s natural resources increases, this traffic will likely increase. Identifying places of refuge for vessels is corollary to such development.

Native Alaskan Community Communication

Three-quarters of Alaska's population lives along the coastline, including the majority of Alaska Natives. Native populations are particularly vulnerable to oil spill impacts, especially in Alaska coastal communities where subsistence lifestyles are predominant. Published research suggests that people who depend on subsistence resources perceive a higher economic, environmental, public health and lifestyle risk associated with the use of certain oil spill countermeasures. The devastating impacts from the Exxon Valdez event shaped the oil spill risk perception for many Alaska Natives.

Impacts associated with economic, subsistence and recreational use have created a low level of trust towards spill response authorities that has been difficult to overcome. The Oil Spill Risk Communication Program for Alaska Natives will promote improved communications between tribal organizations and spill response authorities by providing both groups with information and communication tools for use before, during, and after an oil spill occurs.

The program will have two targeted audiences: spill response authorities and Alaska Natives. The first group will include spill response managers, contingency planners, scientists, and other incident personnel. The Alaska Native group will include community leaders, subsistence user groups, native and tribal organizations individuals and families. The project will result in an outreach program that includes communication/educational tools for each group, with the overriding goal of facilitating two-way communication between these two broad categories of people during all phases of oil spill prevention, planning, response, and restoration.

The project will build on existing studies of stakeholder perceptions and will include targeted information-gathering events to clarify the perceptions of native and subsistence groups. The resulting education and outreach program will improve Alaska Natives’ understanding of oil risks, impacts, recovery, trade-offs, ecology, and the technical limitations of spill response. It will likewise improve the ability of spill response authorities to communicate incident objectives and response priorities to subsistence users and other stakeholder groups. Once an open dialogue has been established, Alaska Natives will have a basis for trusting spill response authorities, because they will be able to verify response progress towards mutually acknowledged environmental goals.

The goal of the Oil Spill Risk Communication Program for Alaska Natives project is to increase the level of trust and understanding between native groups/subsistence users and oil spill response authorities, including state and federal agency personnel, legislators, policymakers, and scientists. We will achieve that goal by developing a comprehensive risk communication program that includes a research report/synthesis document, outreach materials, job aids, training programs, and interactive learning models that can be easily accessed through the Internet and applied or adapted to meet risk communication needs for spill authorities and stakeholder groups in other areas of the United States and worldwide. We will measure the effectiveness of this program using targeted survey instruments that will be delivered to Alaska Natives before and after the outreach program is implemented. We will test the ability of Alaska Natives and oil spill authorities to apply the communication methods using a pre-planned oil spill exercise.

The project objectives include the following:
Identify the ecological, socioeconomic, and cultural resource protection priorities of Alaska Native groups and subsistence users, with a focus on the Cook Inlet and Kodiak Island regions.

• Educate Alaska Natives about the basic principals of oil spill risk, spilled oil fate and behavior, contingency planning, response decision making and tradeoffs, and restoration priorities. The education program will focus on increasing awareness of realistic constraints on the spill response and restoration process.
• Empower Alaska Native villages and coastal communities to reduce oil spill risks in their own communities by increasing awareness of the threat of oil spills from local sources such as tank farms and vessel fueling operations and providing direction on how to mitigate community-based spill risks.
• Inform Alaska Natives about appropriate opportunities and channels for stakeholder input into the Unified Command or incident decision making process.
• Involve Alaska Natives and other stakeholder groups in pre-planned oil spill drills and exercises that include risk communication as a drill objective.
• Educate spill response authorities about the concerns, perceptions, and priorities of Alaska Natives as they relate to oil spill prevention, preparedness, response, and restoration.
• Provide spill response authorities with training and job aids to promote effective risk communication with Alaska Natives before, during, and after an oil spill occurs.
• Use pre-planned oil spill exercises as an opportunity to test the ability of spill response authorities to communicate spill risks with Alaska Natives and to listen to and incorporate the concerns of native groups into incident decision making.

The guiding principals that Cook Inlet RCAC will apply in carrying out this project are:
Successful risk communication requires an understanding of how individuals and organizations perceive risk. Risk perception involves both logic and emotion: risk communication programs must acknowledge and address both.

An effective risk communication program should build on existing relationships by fostering a continuing dialogue between parties (in this case, spill authorities and Native groups) before an incident occurs.

Alaska Natives and other tribal organizations and entities have a heightened vulnerability to the environmental, cultural, and socioeconomic impacts of an oil spill, particularly when a spill threatens to impact subsistence resources. An effective risk communication program should focus on mitigating the potentially devastating cultural and psychological impacts of an oil spill by empowering tribal groups and subsistence users with risk mitigation strategies and educating them regarding response tradeoffs and restoration goals. The communication tools will allow stakeholder groups to replace their vulnerability and fear with information, knowledge, and an appropriate plan of action.

Successful outreach requires tailoring information delivery methods to the unique needs and interests of a target audience. For Alaska Natives, workshops and video presentations are generally more successful than printed reports or web-based training tools in disseminating and collecting information. For response authorities, job aids and communication tools that fit into existing training programs, such as computer-based interactive learning tools, and concise printed materials with Incident Command System-type checklists may be more effective than lengthy workshops that require a large time or travel commitment.

The Oil Spill Risk Communication Program for Alaska Natives is innovative and solution-oriented. The project seeks to transform research results into standards of practice and demonstration projects by developing practical tools that will improve the ability to effectively communicate oil spill information to coastal communities, particularly native groups and subsistence users. The project will contribute to the body of knowledge regarding spill risk perception among native groups and subsistence users, and the reference information developed through this project may be applied to the benefit of coastal communities in other areas of the United States and worldwide.