Enhancing emergency preparedness and response

ESTS also develops and offers training to their response partners. The Hazardous Waste Operations and Emergency Response (HAZWOPER) course helps responders stay safe when responding to an environmental emergency that may involve hazardous chemicals.

The HAZWOPER course is one way that ESTS shares knowledge with emergency responders, training them on the proper equipment and methods to use when responding to hazardous spills in the environment.

Responding to a hazardous spill can be risky as there are many unknown factors.

Responders can’t always know what chemicals or hazards they will encounter at a spill.

Substances can affect responders through inhalation, ingestion, or even permeation—when a chemical passes through the skin.

As the level of uncertainty about the chemicals involved increases, so does the level of protection required.

The week-long course blends both theory and practical learning, with classroom time in the mornings and hands-on exercises in the afternoons.

Through table-top and practical exercises, responders are taught how to identify hazards and conduct safety planning. They also practice performing basic tasks like collecting information and taking samples while wearing the additional safety gear.

Trainers show participants how to use protective equipment, ranging from boots and gloves to the specialized totally encapsulated chemical protection suits that can protect against unknown chemicals.

Understanding the various safety equipment options and when to use them gives responders the skills and knowledge they need to protect themselves on the job.

At the conclusion of each exercise, the participants debrief with the instructors to reinforce what they have learned.

The HAZWOPER course is an important part of Environment and Climate Change Canada’s chemical spill response program. It helps ensure that responders are equipped to make efficient and effective decisions to protect themselves as they work to protect the environment during a hazardous spill response. 

Learn more about ESTS’s work on hazardous spills through the evolving history of the Arctic Marine Oilspills technical seminar.

It's that attitude that took Simon and Environmental Emergencies Officer Frederic Chantal-Fortin to Iqaluit, Nunavut, in 2022 to gather information on how spill-tracker buoys respond to wind and currents.

Their project centred on launching spill-tracker buoys into Frobisher Bay. Bright orange balls the size of a basketball, the buoys transmit timestamped information about their location and water temperature as they drift with wind and currents. This allowed ECCC scientists in the Emergencies Science and Technology Section, who generate models that anticipate the movement and behaviour of a spill during an emergency, to check the buoy’s actual movement against modelled tracker drifts.

The team also gained important practical experience from the exercise, from the cold temperatures out on the water to working with Frobisher Bay’s massive tides, which can leave boats sitting on the sea floor at low tide.

“It’s very interesting,” Frederic noted.” It’s another dimension that you have to get your head around to really plan the work.”

Finally, getting to know their counterparts at other organizations in the area was an additional highlight of the trip, which piggybacked onto several other emergency response exercises in the bay.

The island, with its steep slopes and strong winds, is most easily accessed by helicopter, and only authorized personnel can land there. Under the Oceans Protection Plan (OPP), ECCC scientists have been returning to the island each year for the spring breeding season, when seabirds come to land to nest.

Since seabirds primarily live at sea, breeding season is one of the few opportunities for scientists to study certain species up close: measuring weight and wingspan, taking samples and tagging birds with GPS trackers to follow their movements.

Since the 1970s, ECCC scientists have been studying the island’s Tufted puffins—a large, burrowing seabird with a colourful bill sheath and golden feather tufts that are both lost come winter.

The puffins are declining across their range, but more so in the southern colonies. Triangle Island hosts the largest Tufted Puffin colony south of Alaska, with almost 30,000 breeding pairs. “It sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, compared to colonies in the eastern Aleutian Islands that support hundreds of thousands of pairs, it’s pretty small,” Mark explains.

Under the Oceans Protection Plan (OPP), we are working to provide responders with the information they need to protect the environment from spills and help its recovery after an emergency.

Over the course of six days, Valerie and Zhaohua flew 18 hours and documented over 2,300 kilometres of coastline around Lancaster Sound and Parry Channel.

It was their second survey trip of the summer as they worked to gather baseline data on the Arctic as part of the OPP.

Each type of shoreline is impacted by spills in a different way: oil can harden on rocky shores or sink into the mud in a tidal flat.

Flying at low altitude along the coast, Valerie and Zhaohua captured the different types of shorelines in the area.

The photos and videos were geotagged—marked with the geographic location—so that analysts could go through the images later and record the shoreline types on a map.

Datasets like these are provided to responders who can use the information to quickly prepare a response and recovery plan as soon as a spill happens.

Finalized datasets can also be accessed by anyone through the Open Government Portal.

The information from the surveys can help with local shoreline planning, coastal development, habitat management, or even with studying coastal erosion.

Visit the Open Government Portal to see the results from other shoreline surveys and learn more about the different types of shorelines in Canada!