The Regional Association of Oil, Gas and Biofuels Sector Companies in Latin America and the Caribbean (ARPEL) recently updated the"Oil Response Planning and Readiness Assessment Manual" and its evaluation tool RETOS^TM (Readiness Evaluation Tool for Oil Spills).

The Manual and RETOS™ offer a general guide to industry and governments to assess their level of oil spill response planning and readiness management according to international standards previously established.

RETOS^TM allows the evaluation of seven different types of oil spill response programs from two perspectives, government and industry. With RETOS^TM, users can evaluate response programs of corporate facilities, operations and lines of business as well as programs of local and national government, among others, using specific criteria for each one.

In addition, for each response program, RETOS^TM offers three possible levels of assessment with increasingly demanding planning and readiness criteria. For the most basic level, RETOS^TM establishes "critical" criteria that should be part of any of the seven programs assessed, thus establishing an international standard of "minimum" contents that any program must have to be considered complete.

Once the assessment is completed, RETOS^TM automatically generates a solid evaluation report, the "Analysis of Overall Performance," which highlights any of the categories with criteria that are not met or are incomplete, and shows the results by category, in tables and in the form of radar charts or spider diagrams.

Another of the special features of this valuable tool is the automatic generation of a "Global Improvement Program - Implementation Plan" in which the criteria that are not met or are incomplete are automatically listed in a table highlighting the priorities for improvement and guiding the user to more than 150 bibliographic references with international best practices that allow closing the gaps identified.

In addition to its use by ARPEL member companies in Latin America and the Caribbean, RETOS^TM is used as the tool for national contingency plans assessment in Central America and Caribbean countries through the Central American Commission on Maritime Transport (COCATRAM) and the Regional Marine Pollution Emergency, Information and Training Center (REMPEITC-Caribbean), respectively. It is also used in the programs of The Global Initiative for West, Central and Southern Africa (GI WACAF), for Southeast Asia (GI-SEA) and China (GI-China) as well as by the Oil Spill Preparedness Regional Initiative (OSPRI) in the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. International emergency response cooperatives, such as Oil Spill Response Limited, use RETOS^TM to assess the gaps existing in oil spill management programs of their members throughout the world.

In order to extend the use of this important tool, ARPEL provides in the various countries in the region a course especially designed to facilitate the development of skills to enable companies to check their oil spill response environmental management with the purpose of supporting continuous improvement. The course was aimed at officers, leaders, coordinators and managers responsible for the strategy, preparation and management of contingency plans and response to emergencies in companies of the oil and gas sector.

The Manual and RETOS^TM can be downloaded free of charge from ARPEL website www.arpel.org