Managing human risk during an oiled wildlife response

The safety of response personnel and the public is of paramount importance and the primary objective at any incident. This paper guides personnel on the mechanisms for managing workplace health and safety (WH&S) specific to oiled wildlife response (OWR). The information used to develop this paper was taken from first hand experiences and lessons learnt during OWRs in Australia, Timor Sea, New Zealand, Thailand, Brazil, South Africa, Spain and Alaska.

During maritime environmental emergencies where contaminants are released into the environment wildlife may be threatened or directly impacted. Under these circumstances OWR personnel are commonly mobilised into the field to identify wildlife at risk, provide protection measures for wildlife or to respond to impacted wildlife. For wildlife protection measures devices may be used to keep wildlife away from any threats, they may be transported to alternate clean environments or may be taken into captive care during the response phase. Where wildlife are impacted animals are generally taken into care and rehabilitated using best available practices.

OWR personnel either in the field or in care or rehabilitation facilities can be exposed to a range of hazards and risks. Broadly these can be categorised into physical, chemical and biological hazards.

Physical hazards may include the use of untrained personnel, transportation processes, general fieldwork, exposure to dangerous animals independent of the response, manual handling, vehicle driving, vessel operation, working near roads and water, construction activities, equipment use, exposure to sharps, working with animals and fatigue.

Chemical hazards may include the pollutants that responders are exposed to as a part of the incident, operational chemicals applied during the response to respond to the pollutant and chemicals in use at the wildlife care or rehabilitation centre.

Biological hazards include those that naturally occur in the environment (e.g. tetanus, melioidosis and insect spread diseases etc.) and zoonotic diseases from working with wildlife.

Hazards and risks in the workplace, including during incidents, are managed by specific risk management processes. These are supported by a range of systems available and include processes such as Job Hazard Analysis (JHA), Job Safety Analysis (JSA) and Work Safe Practices (WSP) of which there are many others. These and other common systems used for risk management all follow a standard set of principles (Table 1).

Treatments and control mechanisms to manage risk can be applied during a number of incident stages including the pre-incident, incident and post incident phases (Table 2). Certainly pre-incident opportunities for applying treatments and controls maximises the opportunity to strengthen risk management and should be applied where ever possible.

As a part of the pre-incident phase there is significant value in preparing a generic risk management model to expedite the process during incidents. Table 3 provides an example of pre-identified steps, hazards, risks and supportive treatments and controls specific to OWR that has been applied to oil spill events in Queensland, Australia (e.g. Cape Upstart Spill 2016). This is not an exhaustive list but can be used as an initial guide or template for preparing a risk management processes during the incident response planning stage for a range of spill events.

Mental health hazards during and post incident is certainly a key element to consider for risk management especially for protracted or large scale OWR events. To date this has been addressed as a part of pre-incident contingency planning and planning during the incident to manage the risk in the first instance using standard fatigue management practices and then to have in place supportive mechanisms that can be applied where circumstances require (including post incident). Risks for mental health include stress and mental trauma with supportive mechanisms including professional counselling and medical support. The issue with mental health hazards for OWR is that the trauma of working with large numbers of sick and injured animals and being exposed to animals dying for some people can be overwhelming and difficult to apply effective treatment and control measures. Mental health specific to OWR is an emerging topic and one that requires further investigation by qualified health professionals for practices on how to better manage.

Risk management is a standard for protecting the public and responder safety in all workplaces and environments associated with incidents. The processes described in this document identify physical, chemical, biological and mental health hazards and includes treatments and controls to eliminate or manage their associated risks for OWR. The information in this paper has been drawn from a range of OWR incidents globally demonstrating what has been actually applied during real applications reinforcing the practicality and effectiveness to the solutions listed.