Oil Spill 2010 - Pinellas County Area Contingency Plan

After the 1993 Tampa Bay Oil Spill, the U.S. Coast Guard drafted a detailed Area Contingency Plan to prepare for a future oil spill in the area. The plan has been recently updated by local environmental officials and wildlife organizations to identify environmentally sensitive areas in Pinellas County such as mangroves, estuaries, bird rookeries and marshes. This information has been utilized by the Coast Guard to develop booming strategies to protect each area.

The Area Contingency Plan website has multiple documents and maps related to the 13 counties in Sector St. Petersburg (from Taylor County in the north to Collier County in the south). For ease of use, the maps and documents for Pinellas County have been extracted from the website and are accessible below.

Area Contingency Plan for Pinellas County only:

• Geographic Response Plan Maps (large file - 7M)
• Pinellas County Recommended Revisions to Geographic Response Plan Maps July 2, 2010 (2M)
• Tidal Inlet Protection Strategies (645K)
• Environmental Sensitivity Index (120K)

The Geographic Response Plan Maps and the Recommended Revisions Maps together provide a complete picture of the areas targeted for protection. If the Deepwater Horizon oil spill impacts Pinellas County, the natural resource areas indicated on the Recommended Revisions Maps—plus the areas indicated on the current set of Geographic Response Maps—will be considered for protection by the U.S. Coast Guard and partner agencies. The specific protection strategies will be based on the anticipated impact location, oil characteristics, weather, and water conditions.

The links listed above are PDF files.  If you cannot view a file, click here for a free download of the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Click here to view the entire Area Contingency Plan for Sector St. Petersburg website.