If an oil spill were to occur in Portsmouth Harbor, response teams would be readier than ever. And if University of New Hampshire professor Nancy Kinner gets her way, many other bays and harbors around the world will soon be more prepared as well.
Kinner and her colleagues at the Coastal Response Research Center (CRRC) at UNH have developed a tool that greatly increases the efficiency of oil spill clean-ups, a tool that is currently being used in Portsmouth Harbor.
Sitting in her office, surrounded by maps of various harbors and oil spill trajectories, Kinner credited a summer job at the Shoals Marine Laboratory on Appledore Island for first introducing her to the field of bio-engineering- the field that eventually brought her to the CRRC.
At the laboratory, Kinner was “bit by the science bug” and never looked back. And today, oil spill response teams are very glad she didn’t.
The tool Kinner developed works to bring together all of the information needed to properly respond to an oil spill on one map. This map can then be used to coordinate an efficient clean-up of the spill.
Before this tool was developed different groups of responders, such as oil spill companies, environmentalists, and clean-up crews, would have to gather their own data and combine forces later, Kinner said.
With the new tool, however, the data that was once scattered in many different places is now all together. With one click, responders can bring up a map displaying possible oil spill trajectories, species that could be affected by a spill, and where equipment that is used in clean-ups is being stored.
Kinner also stated that in addition to increasing a response’s efficiency, the new system is extremely simple to use. The tool is based on Google Maps and requires no special training to operate.
While most students at UNH may not hear about many oil spills, they are much more common than many people believe.
“It depends on where an oil spill occurs,” Kinner said. “If an oil spill happened here, all hell would break loose. But in Lousiana, where there are many oil refineries at sea, thousands of spills occur every year.”
Kinner also said that the majority of these spills are not caused by ships leaking oil, but by storms that damage the huge containers where the oil is stored.
While Kinner knows that her tool is greatly needed now to help clean-up oil spills, she also believes it will be even more important in the future. With traffic increasing in the Arctic, Kinner says that oil spills may become even more common, greatly increasing the need for this new tool.