Alaska Oil Spill Permits Tool Completed
Cook Inlet RCAC Expects to Speed Spill Responses
After months of collaboration and review, the Alaska Spill Response Permits Tool is complete and available on the Internet. Cook Inlet RCAC and other members of the Alaska Oil Spill Permit Workgroup are pleased to share what we believe is one of the most useful response tools to be created in Alaska’s oil industry history. The tool is designed to increase the efficiency of filing the correct permits during a response and thereby decrease the time necessary to deploy human and equipment resources.
Alaska’s current statewide oil spill response system involves a complex assortment of permits, forms, and applications that must be prepared and filed during various phases of the response. The new tool provides streamlined access to over 40 important documents. The permit tool allows the user to locate the appropriate form by sorting the permits either by the agency that requires the form or by the type of oil spill response activity that would necessitate the permit.
The Alaska Oil Spill Response Permit Tool was developed to facilitate the process of identifying, filling out, and filing with the appropriate agency the forms and permits required to carry out an effective spill response. The tool was developed through a cooperative work group process, including representatives of those state and federal agencies whose permit forms are included in the tool, as well as representatives from the oil industry and oil spill response organizations.
The tool includes approximately 40 permits, forms, and applications reviewed by the appropriate state or federal agency before being included in this tool. This set of forms represents the documents most commonly required during oil spill response operations in Alaska.
The tool also allows the user to input incident-specific data, which is then exported to a data set that is available for import into the specific permits, forms, and incident response planning documents that are included in the permit tool. Once individual permit forms are filled out, they may be saved as Portable Document Format or PDF files to be printed, e-mailed, or faxed to the appropriate agency or organization. The application for viewing PDF’s, Acrobat Reader, works across different operating system platforms and is widely available for free download. Much of the text in the permit tool is hyperlinked, which means that the user can click on a word or phrase in order to navigate throughout the tool. Hyperlinked text will cause the cursor to display a pointed finger, as opposed to an arrow.
