scope:

1.5 SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS

This paper considers the organizational systems that are in use worldwide to manage oil spills which can affect navigable waters. The primary focus is on those discharges affecting open ocean and coastal waters. The spills might originate from manned and unmanned tank vessels; commercial vessels carrying fuel in bunkers; facilities ashore which store, handle or use oil; transportation pipelines; or offshore platforms.

The scope and time available to conduct this project resulted in distinct limitations, specifically:

• The theoretical literature reviewed is broad but incomplete, and comes primarily from US sources. The sources for information on international response systems and government policies were the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation (ITOPF). The ITOPF information was used without direct confirmation of the authors' interpretation of information from countries. However, since the information was used primarily as a classification mechanism for gross comparisons, this was not judged to be a significant shortcoming.

• The information is significantly more detailed in the area of marine oil spills. An effort was made to gather equivalent information, both in terms of quality and level of detail, on inland/freshwater spills and those that originate from facilities. However, the information was not readily available from existing sources and an extensive research effort was beyond the scope of this project.

• The information is more detailed for the US than for other countries. This is a distinctive aspect of this report since detailed information on other countries was not readily available from existing sources, other than ITOPF.

• The opinions solicited from the response community are neither representative of all viewpoints, nor was this information gathered in a statistical manner. The collection method was informal, and would not meet the rigors of a peer-reviewed research methodology. The only new information generated during this project is that derived from the opinion solicitation.