Colin Daugherty’s accent quickly gives him away as a native Chicagoan.
“It’s unlikely that I ended up here in Alaska, working on boats,” says Daugherty, a recent addition to the council’s Oil Spill Prevention and Response Committee. “I grew up in inner city Chicago. There was a program there that taught kids about boating skills and seamanship. I was part of that growing up, and it kept me out of trouble.”
Daugherty has been on and around boats ever since.
After school, he moved to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he first got involved with spill prevention and response. He was hired at the Hovensa refinery, at the time the largest fuel refinery in the western hemisphere.
“I felt good about what we could do if bad things happen.”
A group of oil spill preparedness planners in Prince William Sound are working together to develop an improved method of training for oil spills. The council has been working for many years to find a suitable oil “surrogate” for spill response training. Surrogates are floating substances such as wood chips, peat moss, or other materials that would mimic an oil slick and have similar interactions with currents, tides, and winds, without harming the environment. A surrogate would provide a target for responders during training and exercises; something which physically interacts with boom and equipment and acts as a visual aid to help responders increase proficiency with gear and tactics.