10 February 2021, the MOIG Director participated; via electronic conferencing platform; to webinar titled “No Such Thing As a Bad Exercise - لا يوجد ما يسمي بالتدريب السيئ” presented by Mohamed Darwish Moustafa; Spill Response Specialist from Oil Spill Response Limited (OSRL); technical partner;.

Mohamed Darwish Moustafa started by highlighting the importance and necessity of exercises that should be viewed as a good opportunity to test preparedness for all involved parties in case of oil spill incidents. He presented the different types of exercises such as desktop, workshop, walk through, full scale incident management and remote/virtual. He explained the exercise fundamentals that consist of setting in advance the date of the exercise in order to plan it properly, defining 03 to 05 objectives at most and operating on a Plan-Do-Review cycle. He advised participants to refer to IPIECA/IOGP Guide for oil spill exercises.

In addition, Mohamed Darwish Moustafa provided crucial information on what works well in both planning and execution of exercises such as the selection of realistic objectives and scenario, the conduct of field deployment prior to exercise, the request of advice from experts and the conclusion of exercises by a short debriefing. In contrast, he talked about what hasn’t worked so well in exercises that requires additional attention such as the complexity of exercises, the setting of larger number of objectives, the management of the unknowns and the omission to provide some information that may have highly negative consequences. Regarding the virtual exercises, Mohamed Darwish Moustafa described the key issues that could be faced related to choice of the communications platforms, amplifier of poor process and IT. He also provided some advices to ensure the smooth conduct of virtual exercises.

Mohamed Darwish Moustafa concluded with response learnings identified by OSRL during Covid-19 pandemic and the level of complexity; when a major spill is combined with the current pandemic in terms of the availability of normal local logistic services and provisions from one side and from another side the Covid-19 spread factors; expected to circulate in the local community related to logistics issues; when they see a team of technical experts and responder arriving in their area.