Marine Pollution Control Act, established to deal with main sources of marine pollution such as runoff, marine engineering works, waste disposal, and boats, is primarily directed at the prevention and management of incidents. Since 2007, the EPA has been undertaking work to developing the emergency response plan for marine chemical spills and its resource pool, building the technical datasheets, and establishing short and long term response strategies, and the data collection and investigations undertaken in this project form part of this ongoing work. In this project, past international cases on claims and compensations from marine spills have been collected and analysed, and response flowcharts for incidents have been developed with clear roles and responsibilities defined for each party. These shall become references for any local incidents in the future. Further, to better understand the extent and boundaries of potential chemical spill incidents, dispersion modeling software that are presently commonly used in other countries have been evaluated for their functionality and applicability, and is a step towards building a marine chemical spill modeling system that is locally applicable. Also investigated in this project were the risk characteristics of each major port in Taiwan with respect to marine chemical spills, as well as an appropriate scale and budget estimate for the future modeling system. An international workshop on emergency responses to marine pollution by chemical and oil shipping incidents have been held as part of this project, in order to promote more interactions between the government and the industry. An international seminar featuring experts from ITOPF was held also. Overall this project has contributed to the capacity building of Taiwan’s responses to chemical spills, to raise the awareness of the importance on having an adequate pool of resources, and can be used as a reference for any future work.

Marine pollution;Chemical spill;Diffusion pattern of pollutants