ADVISOR, March/April 1995
The Role of the Great Lakes Commission
Since August 1992, the Great Lakes Commission has provided support to the Inland Area Planning Committee (IAPC) in developing the area and sub-area contingency plans required under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA).
The Great Lakes Commission's main responsibility is to assist the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in collecting and compiling data on environmentally and economically sensitive areas for the Great Lakes portion of U.S. EPA Region 5. Examples of environmentally sensitive areas include fish hatcheries, parks, wetlands, sanctuaries and national forests. OPA requires that these areas be addressed by Area Contingency Plans (ACPs) to help protect fish and wildlife, as well as habitats and other sensitive environments.
Similarly, data on economically sensitive areas, such as water intakes and marinas, must be collected. The approach taken by the EPA and the IAPC was to develop and compile databases on these sensitive areas, which can be distributed on diskettes to emergency responders and planners.
As a member of the IAPC, the Commission has helped develop database structures for the following databases: environmentally sensitive areas, water intakes, tribal lands, marinas, locks and dams. Data continue to be collected and entered into the databases. All copies of the Region 5 ACP contain diskettes of these databases for use in emergency planning and response.
In addition, latitude and longitude coordinates are being collected for each record in the databases. These data will allow each environmentally sensitive area, marina and water intake to be entered into and used by Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In the near term, this will allow these items to be plotted and distributed on paper maps. In the future, it is hoped that these data will be actively used with a GIS on-site at a spill.
Viewing data in a GIS or on a map, as opposed to a tabular format, allows the data to be seen in its geographic context. For example, if a spill occurs on a river, the spatial databases can be queried to locate the affected river and the data can be overlayed on a map of the rivers, drains and roads. As a result, if a water intake or environmentally sensitive area is located downstream from the spill, it can be identified as being in need of protection.
Acquiring latitude and longitude data presents a significant challenge to the Commission and the EPA. Many times this information is not available. Hence, mapping environmentally and economically sensitive areas is a long-term goal and remains in the prototype stage.
Because of the enormity of the task, the IAPC has decided to focus mapping efforts on the sub-area level. U.S. EPA officials believe that by creating more detailed plans of a smaller geographic area, contingency plans will be more meaningful. Therefore, more emphasis is being placed on the development of contingency planning sub-areas in FY 1995. These sub-areas will be selected according to geopolitical, watershed or ecological boundaries.
Currently, pilot projects are underway in two sub-areas within U.S. EPA Region 5, in Minneapolic/St. Paul, Minnesota, and Southeastern Michigan. Products developed and lessons learned from these sub-areas will be used as models for sub-areas planning throughout the Great Lakes Basin and EPA Region 5.
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Revised: May 9, 1996
Maintained by Christine Manninen, manninen@glc.org