Even if you feel you have adequately completed your due diligence, and even when everyone values safety and compliance and acts accordingly, sometimes environmental emergencies do occur. When an environmental emergency such as a fire, chemical leak, or oil spill takes place at an industrial site, marine vessel, or pipeline, the company involved must act quickly and effectively to minimize the impact on the environment and human health. Your responsibilities will likely include notifying relevant authorities and emergency response teams, while also implementing the company’s own emergency response plan. It may be necessary to have everyone evacuate the affected area, which may first require determining the size and location of the affected area in a relatively short period of time. Regardless of whether a full evacuation is necessary, it will be critical to implement safety measures to protect your workers as well as people, wildlife, and vegetation within the affected area. Additionally, the responsible party (RP) will likely have a responsibility of communicating honestly about the emergency with its stakeholders, the community, and the government, while also bearing in mind concerns about liability. The sheer number of factors to be considered within a highly time-sensitive situation can be overwhelming if one is not adequately prepared and without proper support, adding further stress to an already difficult situation.
Fortunately, when the worst happens, L&M is there for you, to give you the information you need to make these important decisions in a timely fashion. Our team can assist with assessment, recordkeeping, management and mitigation, limiting damage to the environment and helping you demonstrate that you take the incident seriously and respond appropriately. We can also make sure that you learn from what happened this time and make plans to make it less likely to occur again. Our experience can help to make a very difficult situation more manageable. We have handled serious environmental emergencies in the past and we know what to do to protect the environment, the community, and your company. When you call in L&M you are taking a step in the right direction of recovery and remediation, and ultimately the best possible environmental and business outcome in this situation.