Niche Topic Warning -- Today I received a copy of the Fall 2009 issue of United States Coast Guard Proceedings, the "Journal of Safety and Security at Sea." It was a bit late in coming thanks to my failure to update my address when I moved earlier this year, but, as professional publications go, this one was worth waiting for. Our topic this issue is "Preparedness through the lens of Marine Environmental Response," and I encourage anyone interested in the subject to give the free online version a hard look. I normally like to pick the top five articles to read first from a publication like this (it's rather time consuming to get through the entire thing), and it is not an easy task here as I had to slim down from fourteen that I selected straight away looking through the contents. In any case, my personal headliners are:- USCG Environmental Response Capability: Improvements and lessons learned since OPA90;
- Converting to an E-Toolbox: Upgrading the mobile command center;
- The National Response Framework: Providing unified national response;
- Practice Makes Preparedness: Using the Incident Command System in daily operations;
- Assets or Liabilities? Using volunteers during oil spill response.
There is much more to be found between the covers, and again the entire issue is freely available as a PDF file online at http://uscg.mil/proceedings/; please have a look. As for me, chewing through to the extent I'd like will take some time, so I am hoping that the Spring issue does not arrive too soon.