Contingency Planning: Lost at Sea

When a Vermillion Oil platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico early last month, the event extended a raging debate over deep-water drilling that started last April with the BP Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. While the environmental consequences and billions of dollars in costs to clean up these spills hold immense consequences, there is another, overlooked dimension to the debate: the vulnerability of the country’s ports to such calamities.

A study of the U.S. port system under way at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center
for Transportation and Logistics concludes a lack of information about cargo capacity and a heavy
reliance on specific facilities for certain types of cargo put maritime commerce at risk when such openwater disasters occur.