In June, Hugo Nijkamp and Claude Velter provided Sea Alarm’s two-day Wildlife Response Planning Course to emergency response officers from Oil and Gas Operators in Brunei. This course looks at the various challenges that oil spills could pose to wild animals, and the various wildlife incident scenarios that could occur.
There are still places available at a two-day Oil Spill Response (OSRL) course which will introduce participants to the issues specific to responding to wildlife during a spill. The course will be held in Ostend, Belgium on 9-10 October 2014.
Sea Alarm staff, in cooperation with personnel from Massey University’s Wildbase, provided the newly developed Oil Spill Response (OSRL) training course on Wildlife Response Planning, designed to help agencies and individuals involved in oil spill response to prepare for wildlife needs during an incident.
In May, Sea Alarm staff will travel to Savannah, USA for the International Oil Spill Conference (IOSC).
Two National POSOW trainings were held in Cyprus and Crete, Greece in December, 2013. Sea Alarm’s Claude Velter supported the Oiled Wildlife Response portions of both courses, which were given by local personnel who had attended the previous trainings in Brest in May.
Oil Spill Response (OSRL) is offering a new course, developed in conjunction with Sea Alarm and other leading oiled wildlife response experts, designed to introduce personnel and/or agencies which may be involved in planning for, or responding to, an oil spill involving wildlife.
In November Hugo Nijkamp and Paul Kelway of Sea Alarm, in cooperation with staff from Tri-State Bird Rescue and Research, provided several days of training in oiled wildlife response in Trinidad. Local Trinidad press covered this event both in print and online (see links below). Included in the training were response planning and ‘train the trainer’ sessions.
Sea Alarm has been asked to assist the States of Guernsey in reviewing and updating their arrangements for oiled wildlife preparedness and response. As part of the process, an oiled wildlife preparedness training event and stakeholder meeting was held in mid-September in conjunction with an Oil Spill Response (OSRL) shoreline cleanup training course.
The week before the first POSOW ‘Train the trainer’ session (see related article), Claude Velter gave an invited presentation on the work of Sea Alarm at AdriaSpillcon in Opatija, Croatia. He also spoke about the POSOW training programme.
In May, Sea Alarm’s Claude Velter and Saskia Sessions delivered ‘Train the Trainer” courses, in association with Centre Vétérinaire de la Faune Sauvage et des Ecosystèmes (CVFSE) and WWF Finland.
In early November 2011, Sea Alarm facilitated a one day volunteer awareness event in Limerick, Ireland, in cooperation with the Shannon Port Authority and the Irish Seal Sanctuary. The event aimed at providing background information to a group of 25 selected volunteers from the Shannon Estuary area who had expressed an interest in assisting with a future oiled wildlife incident.
After their meeting at the EnSaCo workshop in September 2010, Heather Parker of the US Coast Guard invited Hugo Nijkamp to attend a HAZWOPER course in Everett, Washington, in late February 2011.