A Guide to Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure for Beginners

Sometimes the hardest part about managing an environmental program is understanding what you’re supposed to be managing and whether it even applies to you. Searching online yields hundreds of tools and resources to help, but the more you dig into them the more you realize they’re created for people who have a little more experience with environmental regulations than you do. In other words, they start somewhere in the middle and you’re still at the beginning.

Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasure (SPCC)

Take Spill Prevention, Control, and Countermeasures for example. The SPCC rule was enacted to help prevent discharges of oil into the navigable waters and adjoining shorelines of the U.S. Upon first glance, this sounds as if it applies more to those big oil refineries located somewhere on the Gulf of Mexico, and not to smaller, landlocked companies like yours, which don’t use or store a lot of crude type oils and that are part of a city sewer system which treats its water before discharging it into the local waterways. After all, this logic seems to make sense, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, it’s very common for companies to make an incorrect determination like this about applicability based on what they think a regulation means or who it applies to and this is what can and often does get companies into hot water with environmental regulators. All those resources and tools we mentioned earlier can be helpful, but not when they assume the reader already understands things like how the EPA defines “oil”, what is meant by “capacity” and “navigable waters and adjoining shorelines” and whether it matters that a company discharges into a city sewer system that treats its water or not.

Download the SPCC eBook

That’s why we developed this eBook for SPCC. We thought it would be helpful to start at the very beginning and cover all the things that other tools and resources often skip over or assume the reader already understands, explaining them in a way that makes sense to everyone, regardless of their level of experience. And, because we know how tedious it can be to sort through a sea of saved bookmarks looking for previously saved information, we’ve included numerous links within the eBook to various sections of the EPA’s website so you don’t have to worry about saving any more bookmarks.