Bettter Digital Experience With SecurStars

What is an oil spill contingency plan?

Instead of providing secondary containment for qualified oil-filled operational equipment, an owner or operator may prepare an oil spill contingency plan and a written commitment of manpower, equipment, and materials to quickly control and remove discharged oil. He/she must also have an inspection or monitoring program for the equipment to detect a failure and/or discharge. What is an oil spill contingency plan? An oil spill contingency plan is a detailed oil spill response and removal plan that addresses controlling, containing, and recovering an oil discharge in quantities that may be harmful to navigable waters or adjoining shorelines.

The elements of the oil spill contingency plan are outlined in 40 CFR 109.5, and include:

• Definition of the authorities, responsibilities, and duties of all entities involved in oil removal operations.
• Procedures for early detection and timely notification of an oil discharge.
• Assurance that full resource capability is known and can be committed following a discharge
• Actions for after discovery and notification of a discharge.

What is Water Quality Modelling?

Natural systems are very complicated and high-organized systems. Water quality models try to simulate changes in the pollutants concentration as they move through the environment. A pollutant entering the environment may increase or decrease its concentration due to a large variety of mechanisms. The fate of pollutants is the resultant of interactions between mass transfer and kinetic processes. All these changes are the subject of water quality modelling.

• In a scientific sense - to develop a clear conceptual model based on all available information as well as to understand more fully the transport regime of the pollutant: to test hypotheses, to ensure that they are consistent with governing principals and observations, and to quantify the dominant controlling processes. Without this understanding, a simulation code can be used only as a black-box, and this clearly limits intelligent application of the model;.
• Often in connection with efforts to assign responsibility or assess exposures, to reconstruct the history of pollutant transport, to establish time ranges within which an event could have begun, or within which contaminants could have reached specified level in certain areas;.
• Future contaminant distributions must be calculated, either under existing conditions or with engineering intervention to control the source or alter the flow regime. These include for example the choice of used computer code, the way of discretization, the level of effort required in model calibration, and the analysis of the appropriated assumptions. By definition a model is a simplified approximation to the real system. A simple model is always preferred to complex model, as long as it captures the essence of the problem. An overly complex model not only increases computational time and costs, but also introduces additional uncertainties if detailed data are not available. .

What is Sediment Modelling?

Sediment transport is the movement of solid particles (sediment), typically due to a combination of gravity acting on the sediment, and the movement of the fluid in which the sediment is entrained. Sediment transport occurs in natural systems where the particles are clastic rocks (sand, gravel, boulders, etc.), mud, or clay; the fluid is air, water, or ice; and the force of gravity acts to move the particles along the sloping surface on which they are resting. Sediment transport due to fluid motion occurs in rivers, oceans, lakes, seas, and other bodies of water due to currents and tides. Transport is also caused by glaciers as they flow, and on terrestrial surfaces under the influence of wind. Sediment transport due only to gravity can occur on sloping surfaces in general, including hillslopes, scarps, cliffs, and the continental shelf continental slope boundary.

Coastal sediment transport takes place in near-shore environments due to the motions of waves and currents. At the mouths of rivers, coastal sediment and fluvial sediment transport processes mesh to create river deltas. Coastal sediment transport results in the formation of characteristic coastal landforms such as beaches, barrier islands, and capes.

• Sedimentology encompasses the study of modern sediments such as sand, silt, and clay,and the processes that result in their formation (erosion and weathering), transport, deposition and diagenesis.Sedimentologists apply their understanding of modern processes to interpret geologic history through observations of sedimentary rocks and sedimentary structures.
• Sedimentary rocks cover up to 75% of the Earth's surface, record much of the Earth's history, and harbor the fossil record. Sedimentology is closely linked to stratigraphy, the study of the physical and temporal relationships between rock layers or strata. .