By Ashley Wiebe

Training exercise focuses on simulated oil spill

Jul 13, 2017 | 4:34 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB — Pipelines span the country and the United States.

In an emergency situation, like an oil spill, it’s crucial crews know how to contain them quickly and as safely as possible.

Staff with TransCanada met with members of the Hazmat team with the Medicine Hat Fire Department to make sure their skills are sharp if anything happened here.

“We train for a lot of different things, product clean up in rivers or canals or anything like that,” said Hazmat team lead Willy Taillon. “We would assist the people that own the product or that had the spill.”

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Bright, yellow booms are just one piece of equipment needed to help contain an oil spill.

On Thursday, crews used them for practise, training on the South Saskatchewan river.

“It is very difficult, a very labour intensive job to control a spill in a river body,” Taillon said. “It takes a lot of people a lot of equipment. This is just a small portion of what would happen in a real event.”

“What we were doing is testing our ability to respond, rapidly respond, to an incident and also coordinate with local first responders,” said Matthew John, a communications specialist with TransCanada.

John said staff train numerous times a year and said it’s important to connect with the people who could be first one the scene.

“We’d be first here to assess,” said Taillon. “We try and identify the product that’s in the river and then contact whoever, the pipeline it belongs to, and work in conjunction with them on trying to contain it and clean up the spill.”

“It’s largely a trust building exercise as well, so we ensure that we’re both speaking the same language, we both understand the same management techniques of how to respond to an incident, how to divide up resources,” John added.

The team is working against the clock and the river current.

In an emergency, a crew will evaluate the situation after arriving on scene. Then they’ll plan to move into action.

“We’re just using the river and the banks and the current, set up a game plan or an incident action plan to divert it to a skimmer,” Taillon said.

“You get the boats on the river, you put the booms down stream so you can then contain it and then you would start beginning to deploy skimmers to recover that product,” John added.

John said the number one priority is safety, making sure everyone stays safe while near or on the water.

“Safety is our number one priority,” John said. “That’s safety for people and that’s safety for the environment and it’s really what we’re focused on and we do train this regularly to ensure that in the event that a scenario does happen, everyone is prepared and everyone that goes into that incident ready and trained and gets home safely at the end of the day.”