Sea Alarm presentation day at ITOPF

ITOPF is one of Sea Alarm’s key partners and the two organisations have been cooperating for over a decade now, both when responding to oil spills and also in some wildlife preparedness activities. A presentation day was held at ITOPF’s offices in London in October, to strengthen this relationship and bring some of ITOPF’s newer staff up to speed with Sea Alarm’s work. Hugo Nijkamp and Saskia Sessions made a series of presentations, to provide an overview of oiled wildlife preparedness and response and explain the nature of Sea Alarm’s work. A mystery spill in Estonia in 2006 (to which ITOPF also responded) was examined as a case study to demonstrate Sea Alarm’s role in sourcing and coordinating international wildlife response expertise and some of the technical aspects on managing the flow of animals through an oiled wildlife response facility were discussed. The presentations generated lots of questions from ITOPF staff and their feedback was that the session was very useful. It is the intention of both parties to repeat this exercise regularly in the future and to dig deeper into some issues of interest.