lose to 10,000 large commercial vessels transit the Aleutian Islands annually for trade between Asian and US markets, and each of these represents a potential marine environmental hazard should something go amiss, says Buddy Custard, president and CEO of the Alaska Maritime Prevention & Response Network. That number doesn’t account for the thousands of fishing vessels, barges, and other boats operating off Alaska’s shores. “Our first emphasis is not having an incident whatsoever. It’s about protecting the crews, the cargo, and the Alaska coastline,” Custard says. “However, our message is: Prevention Focused—Response Ready. In the event of an incident, we maintain and have the capability to mobilize the largest inventory of response resources in the region 24/7.”

The Network was created in 2011 by Alaska maritime industry stakeholders as a nonprofit organization to provide enrolled tank and non-tank vessel protection in Alaska waters with 24/7 vessel tracking and access to partners with oil spill response resources.

“It’s all about making sure that the companies [that are enrolled with the Network] are in compliance with all US federal oil spill, prevention, and response regulations,” Custard says.

These regulations are based on the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which came in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill disaster. The incident saw about 11 million gallons of crude oil spilled into the Prince William Sound in 1989. It was the worst oil spill in the country’s history until the BP Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

According to the EPA, the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 “streamlined and strengthened the EPA’s ability to prevent and respond to catastrophic oil spills. A trust fund financed by an oil tax is available to clean up spills when the responsible party is incapable or unwilling to do so.”

“The [Oil Pollution Act] requires oil storage facilities and vessels to submit to the Federal government plans detailing how they will respond to large discharges,” the EPA states in its summary of the act.

The Alaska Maritime Prevention & Response Network places a heavy emphasis on prevention when it comes to the marine environmental services it provides.

“We have a very robust prevention aspect to the scope of work that we provide to mariners through the Network. We do fund a 24/7 monitoring center that’s operated by the Marine Exchange of Alaska based out of Juneau,” Custard says. “We provide a service where we can help detect vessels that might be in trouble early so that we can render assistance or help coordinate—keeping that vessel out of harm’s way.”

Signs of distress can look like anything from a vessel’s speed slowing down significantly to it coming unusually close to the coastline.

“If we feel like the vessel is slowed down too much, we might inquire: ‘Captain, why are you coming to all stop out in the middle of the ocean? Is there something wrong?’” Custard explains.

Most of the time, there isn’t anything wrong, the ship slowed to avoid weather or conduct maintenance or training.

“But we do pick up some ships that are just broken. They have a casualty to their main propulsion plant—one of their engines—and they need to fix it,” Custard says, noting that the Network then reaches out to relevant agencies and organizations, such as the US Coast Guard, rescue tug and salvage companies, and vessel company representatives, to ensure everyone is aware of the vessel’s elevated risk profile.

Custard recalls an incident earlier this year with a large commercial vessel caught in a Western Alaska winter storm just north of the Aleutian Islands.

Heavy seas were impeding the vessel’s movement and driving it toward the shore. Though the ship was still more than 50 miles offshore, the Network’s monitoring center, through the use of geofencing technology and other filters, identified the ship’s elevated risk profile and confirmed with the captain that they were struggling, Custard explains.

The captain said they were trying to get out of the situation but that their 2-knot drift rate might ground the vessel within twelve to eighteen hours.

“So, we elevated it to a vessel of concern and provided, through our protocols, notifications to the US Coast Guard, vessel-owner operator, company salvage provider for emergency towing, and the oil spill removal organization that supports them per their vessel response plan,” Custard says.

Through the increased level of communication and an expert understanding of the currents and waterways, it was possible to keep the ship out of harm’s way without the rescue tug hooking up to the ship, Custard says.

According to Custard, at all times the Coast Guard, ship’s owner, and salvage provider were connected to ensure an accurate understanding of the vessel’s condition and to mobilize response resources if needed.

Such preventative rescue efforts do not make headlines but are a core part of the work carried out by marine environmental service companies and organizations.

However, not all casualties are rescued. In those cases, the Network taps a partner member-owned cooperative, the Alaska Chadux Corporation, to provide oil spill response services.

Chadux is a US Coast Guard classified oil spill removal organization that is also a classified Alaska state primary response action contractor. The organization has more than twenty-five years of experience responding to oil spills in Western Alaska, Custard says.

Alaska Chadux has seventeen response hubs strategically located throughout Western Alaska and has developed rapid response systems to utilize small aircraft in order to establish bases in remote villages with small runways. Together, the Alaska Maritime Prevention & Response Network and Chadux manage, own, and control a large inventory of prevention and response capabilities, including two fully-dedicated, ocean-going, purpose built oil spill response vessels. They also have access to a large emergency towing vessel, the Endurance, operated by Paradigm Marine.

Unlike the Alaska Maritime Prevention & Response Network, 1-Call Alaska, a subsidiary of Resolve Marine, directly provides marine environmental services rather than functioning as a facilitator and coordinator. Resolve Marine is an international corporation with offices on every continent except Antarctica.

“We are basically focused on maritime emergency response all over the world. While we do subcontract people and equipment all over the world, we look at ourselves as a true emergency response organization, a true emergency response company,” 1-Call Alaska General Manager Todd Duke says. “We own a lot of equipment, we don’t rent it from other people, we own it, we operate it. We employ the people that operate it.”

With its primary base of operations strategically established in Dutch Harbor, 1-Call Alaska also has depots in Nome, Homer, Juneau, and Anchorage.

Though 1-Call Alaska also emphasizes prevention, Duke points out that there are already thousands of pages of regulation mostly written to prevent incidents from occurring. But when a spill does occur, it’s vital to have the skimmers, booms, and other equipment necessary to mitigate the damage.

“We’re not in the vessel tracking business—even though we do that—we’re not in the prevention business, we’re in response,” Duke says. “That’s important. You got to have the response readiness capability because you’re not going to prevent every single incident. You will prevent a lot but not every one.”

1-Call Alaska has built its response efforts around keeping oil or fuel inside a damaged ship or taking it out in a controlled manner to minimize harm to the surrounding marine environment.

“Even though the vessel may run aground or there may be a collision, we keep the maximum amount of oil from entering into the environment,” Duke says.

Duke points out that though large commercial vessels pose a greater risk to the environment if they run aground, his team works more regularly with fishing vessels.

“They aren’t as closely regulated and sail closer to shore,” Duke says, adding that their likelihood of having a problem and needing assistance is higher.

To better handle these situations, 1-Call Alaska has a small, fully-equipped oil response vessel, the Makushin Bay, for emergency towing. The company’s larger emergency towing vessel is the Resolve Pioneer.

“On the Great Circle Route, she’s gone out and she’s done a dozen rescues or so in her time here in Alaska—she does about two a year,” Duke says. “We keep our vessels manned 24/7, 365 days a year. You can always go onboard a Resolve vessel and find a crew ready to get underway.”

1-Call Alaska also has full-time commercial divers on staff to help safely unload fuel and other hazardous liquids from a casualty ship.

The divers are trained to use a patented underwater hot tap system to drill into the side of a ship, put a valve in place, and safely pump fuel out of the damaged vessel. The system was put to work last year in New York.

“There was a vessel that was sunk in World War II, and it was still full of lube oil. They thought that maybe there was about 50,000 or 60,000 gallons of lube oil on this thing,” Duke says. “When we got done, we took 450,000 gallons of oil off of it. This was all done by divers and our remotely operated vehicles.”

The Alaska Maritime Prevention & Response Network is expanding its capabilities through research and development efforts.

“Technology has just exploded in leaps and bounds. It’s not just in the tech industry, it’s throughout the gamut of industry,” Custard says. “So we’re always looking at new technology that we can also develop to help the marine industry remain safe.”

One research and development effort that the Network has spearheaded and funded is its Emergency Vessel Attachment & Towing System, or EVATS.

“It’s a new breed of emergency towing equipment that can get things out there quicker and help towing companies hook up to a vessel that’s disabled and adrift, keeping it under control better,” Custard says.

The system has yet to be used in an emergency situation. However, the Network partnered with the Norwegian Coast Guard and the Norwegian Coastal Authority to test the equipment during an exercise in 2019.

“So it has been used, and they gave us a big endorsement. They like it,” Custard says.

Custard is also looking toward the Arctic as more ice melts and opens up potential trade routes.

The first step in protecting the Arctic marine environment from oil spills is having the government work more closely with industry when coming up with policies and systems in the polar region, Custard says.

“Industry has a lot of resources that they can bring to bear… a lot of knowledge about working up in that environment, and industry are the ones that are going to be using those shipping lanes as the ice continues to recede,” Custard says. “I do not believe that the relationship [between the government and industry] is as close as it should be.”

Custard points out that the international community is already making progress with coming up with best practices for industry in the Arctic.

“But I have to say, domestically, we need to start doing more of that here in Alaska.”

The primary challenge is an almost total lack of infrastructure.

“There are few harbors or ports in the vast region of Western Alaska, which makes it difficult to mount a response. So, understanding that, it’s all about partnerships,” he says.

For Custard, this means identifying what relationships need to be built to ensure air carriers, shippers, vessels of opportunity, response teams, and coastal communities are ready to go if there’s an incident.

“Obviously, coastal communities have a vested interest with their cultural and subsistence lifestyle,” Custard says, noting that he would like to leverage these communities’ traditional knowledge to create a program to develop community-based responders in the Arctic.

“It’s kind of like a first responder: we would give them some basic oil spill response equipment, such as booms and skimmers. So, if there is a spill, they can boom off some of the sensitive salmon streams and other sensitive habitats and commence cleaning up the impacted area to mitigate any lasting damage to the coastal environment.”

Duke notes that traffic traversing Arctic waters is generally from Russia to China, with little “normal” commercial traffic. The major hurdle to getting the economic momentum to provide marine environmental services for these ships in the Arctic is that these vessels are traveling through US waters under the idea of innocent passage, which means they are not subject to US regulations.

Additionally, those providing marine environmental services in the Last Frontier already have a full plate. The Aleutian Island chain alone comprises more than 1,000 miles of shoreline—almost the same amount of coastline from the US/Canada border to Mexico.

However, it’s clear that if marine environmental services are needed in the region, Alaska’s experts will do everything in their power to provide them.