Face to Face
Pam Chelgren-Koterba
Incident Management
Team Readiness Coordinator

Pam Chelgren-Koterba joined Alyeska and moved to Valdez in 1996 to coordinate oil spill training exercises and work as a Ship Escort Response Vessel System (SERVS) crisis readiness manager. She is a retired National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) commander with 23 years of service, including seven years of sea duty. Chelgren-Koterba’s final NOAA posting was in Washington, D.C., where she provided scientific support for oil-spill response projects. She now runs incident command system training and response exercises and would help manage SERVS’ response in the event of an incident. Always a sailor, Chelgren-Koterba spends her free time on the water onboard her family boat.

Q: How do you prepare for an oil spill?

A: Alyeska’s best oil spill preparation is to avoid having oil spills. However, if there is an incident, the company is ready with three different oil spill contingency plans, one each for the pipeline, terminal and tankers. These plans propose the incident-specific response for spills. They prioritize the initial use of resources to quickly assess the situation and determine what equipment and responders should be deployed. The plans also outline steps for ongoing incident response.

My job with SERVS focuses on tanker- and terminal-related incidents. SERVS has the country’s single largest cache of spill-response equipment. Our resources include more than 42 miles of boom, 100 skimmers, storage capacity for more than 800,000 barrels of oil and pre-positioned gear cached at five fish hatcheries and five other key Prince William Sound locations. SERVS also has some 60,000 gallons of dispersant stockpiled, 300 contractor-response-personnel, 10 tugs and 350 contracted fishing vessels.

SERVS conducts 30-to-50 response exercises and drills every year to ensure that these resources are prepared to quickly and efficiently respond to incidents. These exercises range from tabletop sessions to actual equipment deployments that give responders hands-on practice.

Q: How do fishing vessels respond to oil spills?

A: Fishing vessels play important roles in our open water incident plans. Depending upon the situation, they could do everything from pulling boom and towing skimmers to shuttling mini barges full of recovered oil between skimmers and larger holding barges.

We always keep a minimum of 50 fishing vessels ready to respond. Additional vessels have opportunistic contracts that pay them for actually participating in training and incident response. All of these vessels and crews must participate in training exercises to maintain their response readiness. We have drilled with as many as 99 fishing vessels at a single site to ensure that contracted vessels can do their jobs and that incident managers can effectively coordinate major responses.