This week’s #dwhstories thread looks back at some of the complexities of volunteering during the #dwhoilspill response. #oilspill
Back in 2010, I served as Director of @joinacf, an awesome conservation org working in Coastal Alabama. We had a number of volunteer programs that involved local residents in education and citizen science activities.
We received calls by the 100s then the 1000s as the spill progressed, as did other NGOs like @MobileBaykeeper. We realized that what was happening was beyond the capacity of any one org & decided to work together to identify what, if any volunteer opportunities existed.
In the first weeks of the spill, our organizations received over 10,000 calls from people eager and desperate to help. The calls were varied and ranged from the mundane to the strange.
Inspired by Dawn dishwash commercials, many looked for an opportunity to participate in wildlife rescue. But that’s not how wildlife rescue can or should work— untrained volunteers can cause much more harm than good when it comes to dealing with injured and stressed wildlife.
Some were quite creative in their approaches to volunteerism, offering inventions to cap the well, vacuum up oil, and manufacture boom— the long, tube-like structures placed in the water to divert oil away from sensitive habitats.
At some point someone put out a call to hairdressers that hair could be used to make boom, and suddenly we were awash in calls from people offering to send their hair.
After promising to find work for would-be volunteers, we needed to figure out how to get into Incident Command and carve out a role for our organizations to help.
BP was adamant that volunteers not touch oil, and at this point in the spring there was no oil on shore yet, though it could arrive any day depending on weather conditions and ocean currents
I spent hours reading various oil spill documents I’d downloaded from the internet in the hopes of learning more about how all of this was supposed to work. I ran across the oil coverage assessment worksheets used by officials to determine how much of a given area was oiled.
Then it hit me— we could send people out to look for oiled wildlife and oiled shorelines and report that information back to officials. Maybe we couldn’t clean the oil up, but we had a lot of feet and eyes on the ground in Alabama, so perhaps our volunteers could be of service?
We already had the core of a program in place— @joinacf had recently developed a citizen science program known as the “Shoreline Assessment” where we trained people to go out on the water and look for invasive species and evidence of pollution.
Local partners including @casicallaway and I met with official & floated the idea of using volunteers to patrol the shoreline, looking for oil and oiled wildlife. The officials agreed, and we formed a small coalition of our organizations and the State of Alabama.
We called our group COAST— the Coalition of Active Stakeholders. Now an official volunteer program, we set out to develop training and begin getting people out to the coastline as soon as possible. Our program would be called the Volunteer Field Observer Program, or VFOB.
We created training slides, using the @NOAA Rapid Shoreline Assessment as our basis to help people ID oil and the extent of oil coverage on the shore. We printed 100s of maps of segments of Alabama’s shoreline on a small deskjet printer that quickly expired from the effort. 
By this point in the spring, the staff and I were working 14-18 hour days, running on adrenaline and Coca Cola. Volunteers appeared like angels when we needed them most. Somehow food showed up everyday around lunch time, brought by volunteers who knew we would forget to eat.
In early May, there was a knock on my office door and a young man with a British accent introduced himself as Ed. He had flown all the way from Great Britain to get involved. When he arrived in Mobile, he called the Chamber of Commerce and they directed him to us. Bless you, Ed.
The fortuitous help from people and businesses in the form of money or time was a recurring theme of the summer, and is something I still recall with gratitude and amazement.
Here’s how the Program worked. Volunteers would patrol 1 mile of shoreline, take photos & record the GPS coordinates for any oiled areas or wildlife, and then fill out a data sheet and report to return to us, which we would review, compile and send over to Incident Command.
At the height of the program, over 300 people participated, walking the shore in the heat of summer, determined to help. Our first Volunteers copied their reports on handouts and then called in or dropped off the information at the office, we then entered the info into a database
We had issues with people being unable to take photos or get accurate GPS coordinates— smart phones weren’t as ubiquitous then as they are today.
We connected with Jeffrey Rubini with the US Coast Guard, who had rotated into ICS as a volunteer coordinator. He had experience with previous oil spills & seemed to welcome the opportunity to engage volunteers. He provided our volunteers with cameras & gps units.
Our problem of data processing and turnaround was solved as well when the GPS company @TrimbleCorpNews offered to build an app called Map the Spill at no cost for our volunteers to upload their reports and photos. tinyurl.com/swqn9bd
The COAST coalition and our volunteers patrolled in May, June, July and most of August. I felt honored to have played a very small part in the response and to have given people an opportunity to participate in the volunteer effort.
After that summer, I wasn't contacted again about the VFOB program, but 5 year later, preparing for a talk, I came across an after-action report for the spill that talked about the program in positive terms. Perhaps the VFOB program will live on and be utilized in the next spill.
