Area plans are often brought into action when facilities are unable to handle spills on their own. Under the authority of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, EPA initially established 13 Areas covering the U.S. and convened Area Committees comprised of federal, state, and local government agencies to prepare contingency plans for the designated areas. The Area Contingency Plans include detailed information about resources (such as equipment and trained response personnel) available from the government agencies in the Area. They also describe the roles and responsibilities of each responding agency during a spill incident, and how the agencies will respond if they are called upon in an emergency. These plans also describe how two or more Areas might interact, such as when a spill occurs in a river that flows between Areas, to assure that a spill is controlled and cleaned up in a timely and safe manner. This Handbook is a guide and reference for the development of Area Contingency Plans (ACPs) for environmental emergencies. While it is primarily intended for use by EPA emergency response program personnel, area contingency planning is necessarily an inter-agency process, and the use of this handbook to inform other agencies of EPA’s planning process is encouraged. Because area plans are focused on specific geographic domains, with many physical and jurisdictional variables, there can be no ‘one size fits all’ plan format, but maintaining a national consistency in the basic content is important, particularly considering the statutory and regulatory requirements by which EPA and other agencies are bound.
This handbook was developed by EPA’s Area Planning Workgroup during 2011 and 2012 and incorporates the accumulated knowledge of years of contingency planning experience. Although ACPs are specifically mandated by the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA 90), EPA’s responsibilities under other laws, including CERCLA, make an all-hazards approach to contingency planning desirable. The processes of planning for responses to all types of environmental emergencies (e.g., oil spills, hazardous materials releases, natural disasters) share common elements that have been demonstrably successful in major responses.
In the interests of conciseness and accessibility, this handbook will not recapitulate extensive portions of related documents, but will list key references, including laws, regulations and technical resources, in appendices. This Handbook is available for download as a PDF file from EPA’s Office of
Emergency Management web site at http://www.epa.gov/oem/.
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