Clean Caribbean & Americas (CCA) recently announced that the next International Mobilization, Preparedness & Response Exercise (MOBEX Amazonia 2010) will be held in Manaus, Brazil, on Wednesday-Friday, December 1-3, 2010. CCA member Petrobras, the national oil company of Brazil, will be the host for the exercise, and the State of Amazonas, Brazilian Navy and national authorities will represent the government of Brazil. As with MOBEX Panama 2007, MOBEX Amazonia 2010 will continue the partnerships with the International Oil Spill Conference and will be holding the IOSC Workshop the day before MOBEX, on Tuesday, November 30, 2010.

 

Over the years CCA has conducted MOBEX in venues representing the broad spectrum of CCA members' operations, languages and challenges. Venues ranged from the first MOBEX (1995) in the Bahamas, the Caribbean island of St. Kitts (1998), Spanish speaking Dominican Republic (2001), French Martinique (2005), and the Central American Republic of Panama (2007). The objective for 2010 is to conduct MOBEX on the South American mainland.  Manaus and Portuguese speaking Brazil also afford us the opportunity to train and deploy equipment in a flowing river scenario and integrate into Petrobras' and the Brazilian national response system.

 

Manaus is the largest city of the central Amazon and lies at the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Solimões (famous for the "meeting of the waters"). Petrobras production fields in Urucu send crude oil and gas by pipelines to a storage and shipment terminal upriver in Coari. A river tanker then delivers crude oil to the Petrobras refinery in Manaus. The refinery is also the location of one of Petrobras' Environmental Defense Centers (CDA), which provide Tier 1 and Tier 2 preparedness and response services.

 

CCA anticipates participation from the many government, industry and NGO partners with whom they have worked on previous MOBEXs and who routinely work together to build oil spill preparedness and response capacity in the Caribbean/Latin America region. Manaus and the Amazon River are uniquely interesting, and will provide an educational and valuable Tier 1, 2, and 3 exercise, conference and workshop.