he morning of February 8, workers in the Southwest village of Kwigillingok discovered a spill of diesel fuel from a tank farm. Nearly 9,000 gallons overflowed from a 10,000-gallon tank during a transfer operation, according to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.

Four days later, US Coast Guard personnel arrived and determined that the spill posed a threat to the Kwigillingok River, about 500 feet away. The agency brought in a three-person team from Resolve Marine, an oil spill response contractor, to conduct on-site plume delineation, drone imagery, and sampling.

Over the next week, Resolve Marine mobilized recovery materials from its staging area in Bethel. The company had to create infrastructure for its specialized crews, who were handling the clean-up, to both work and stay in. Then the company had to move equipment to recover the fuel, but the nearest skid-steer excavator was miles away in Kongiganak. Some equipment was driven overland from village to village, and some had to be flown in. For that task, Resolve Marine used cargo aircraft suitable for short takeoffs and landings because the village’s runway is only about 1,500 feet long.

“We transported equipment from civilization to Bethel and then took it from Bethel to Kwig,” explains A.W. McAfee, the company’s West Coast regional manager.

Just a typical job for Resolve Marine, known worldwide as a leader in emergency response, vessel salvage, and specialized marine services. McAfee says the company’s excellence in logistics is key to its success in remediation work—along with its workers’ ability to solve complex problems.

Resolve Marine began in Florida and in the Caribbean in 1980 when founder Joseph Farrell Jr., a veteran of both the US Coast Guard and US Navy, began providing salvage services to coastal freighters and small vessels with his tugboat RESOLVE. This led to his forming Resolve Marine, as it’s known today, in 1984.

Over the years, the company expanded from domestic operations to the global stage. Core services include environmental mitigation, compliance, demolition, marine civil works, drydock repairs, and welding. Clients range from global energy companies and government agencies to insurance companies and ship owners. The company even has an educational arm called Resolve Academy that provides hands-on training in marine firefighting and safety.

Employees are experts in regulatory compliance for marine firefighting as well as shipyard repair, towing, aviation, and drydock services. Emergency response services include assistance to every type of vessel all over the world. Salvage and recovery have involved anything from removing sunken or floating vessels or the remains of offshore structures to taking pollutants from sunken vessels.

“In Alaska, we do ten to fifteen emergency vessel tows a year in the Bering Sea and the North Pacific,” says McAfee, who works at Resolve Marine’s Anchorage base. “We’ll get a phone call about a vessel that’s not able to be underway. We keep two salvage tugs in Dutch Harbor, and we’re able to go out and hook them up to a tow and tow them to a safe harbor or to our shipyard to do a repair.”

Alternately, McAfee says, if a ship ends up on the rocks and there’s a spill, Resolve Marine will go out and rescue the crew before containing and dealing with any environmental hazard. Size doesn’t matter: the company can handle ships of all sizes. “We generally see anything from 40-foot fishing vessels to 500-foot container ships,” he says.

Resolve Marine maintains a fleet of marine assets—including tugs rigged for towing, emergency response, and moving equipment and people—and a fleet of barges and heavy-lift equipment for salvage, project work, and wreck removal. The company has twenty-one depots dedicated to salvage, marine firefighting, and environmental response. It also has eight worldwide warehouses at or near ports around the world in Anchorage; Dutch Harbor; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Ijmuiden, Netherlands; Mumbai, India; Singapore; Theodore, Alabama; and Tacoma, Washington. From these eight warehouses, Resolve Marine can immediately deploy equipment in prepackaged containers on cargo planes or trucks in the event of an emergency. Those packages can include pumps, patches, oil spill containment equipment, or any combination. The eighth warehouse opened last year.

In April 2023, Resolve Marine expanded its footprint with a 10,000-square-foot warehouse and operations facility in Tacoma.

“The expansion provides a platform for Resolve Marine to pursue business development opportunities with new clients in the region,” the company said in a press release. The location has facilities for ship husbandry, marine construction, emergency and environmental response, and salvage projects. Commercial diving and underwater welding and inspection are also available in Tacoma.

Like other Resolve Marine locations, Tacoma is outfitted with equipment that can be deployed 24/7/365 by air, sea, or truck. Its location means Resolve Marine is able to save clients money and time when needed equipment and crews don’t have to travel as far to get to them.

“We opened the Tacoma facility because a lot of our Alaska clients are Pacific Northwest-centric, and we wanted to serve those clients better when they’re down south,” says McAfee. “We opened the office based on a need we saw from our Alaska business. Many of our clients are based there, and it gives us the opportunity to share resources between the facilities.”

Right after the Tacoma facility opened, one of the company’s clients had an on-board fire just 5 miles away, so Resolve Marine was able to deploy Tacoma-based crews as first responders.

Global environmental and marine casualty response are at the heart of Resolve Marine’s services.

“It’s mostly marine centric,” says McAfee, “but, generally speaking, because we have the people and the equipment, we’re happy to help with any environmental remediation. We have response depots strategically located around Alaska and the world and specialty crews ready to use those assets if there’s an oil spill or a diesel release.”

McAfee credits the company’s remediation and emergency successes to its highly skilled and dedicated team of oil spill experts, divers, marine firefighters, and more.

“We have experts in the West Coast region that are very interested in supporting our clients, and then if we have other issues that we can’t field locally in the region, we can tap into the rest of the experts inside of the company,” he says. “It’s the same thing with equipment: we operate regionally with an understanding that if we need more support, we have it, and we’re not afraid to tap into that support when it’s needed.”

That deep well of experience is something to be proud of, according to Jennifer Schlueter, Resolve Marine’s senior manager for brand marketing and communications. “We’ve got salvage masters, marine architects, and marine engineers, and all of them are multi-disciplined and wear multiple hats,” she says. “No two incidents are alike, but our experts have usually seen something similar, and that experience is vital when clients are suddenly in an emergency situation.”

Expertise and equipment are part of the package deal. “We strive to be the ‘easy button’ for our clients,” says McAfee. “Because we deal with outside-the-box problems a lot, they’re not foreign to us. Most of our clients are marine based and very process oriented, and they’re doing the same thing every day, so our same thing is their one-off. Our crews are really used to ‘Hey, have you ever seen this before?’ and ‘No, but we’re innovative and we’re used to thinking outside the box and we have the resources to deal with that.’”