The Coast Guard and other agencies coordinate hypothetical clean-up efforts at the Grand Aleutian Hotel Wednesday. (Annie Ropeik/KUCB)

Coast Guard crews and local stakeholders are playing out a major hypothetical disaster in Unalaska this week. It’s part of a federal oil spill response drill that’s taking place in the Aleutians for the first time.

The drill is based on a worst-case scenario: a 500,000-gallon oil spill in the waters around the island, after a hypothetical landslide above North Pacific Fuel’s tank farm near Mt. Ballyhoo.

For Capt. Paul Mehler, the Coast Guard’s chief for Western Alaska and the Arctic, the drill is a chance for everyone the spill would impact to combine their individual response plans, and see what works.

"And every time we do this, we’re gonna learn: 'You know what? We could use this better.' So it’s a great chance to get people together in a command environment where we are doing it like we would real time," Mehler says. "Everything’s an exercise, and we start every conversation with 'this is an exercise,' but we’re trying to play this as real as we can."

On Wednesday, that meant setting up an incident command center at the Grand Aleutian Hotel. About 80 people spent the day coordinating hypothetical response efforts and fielding role-players’ calls about health hazards.

For some, it’s a new experience. North Pacific Fuel is playing the responsible party for a large-scale drill like this for the first time in their 16-year history in Unalaska. Contingency Director Lisa Lewis says it’s important to practice working with everyone who’d be part of a response -- "and for us to realize that a spill at our facility will eventually not only affect our personnel, it’ll actually affect our neighbors," she says. "The health, the safety, the economy of this island will be affected by the spill of this... you know, worst case scenario that we’re calling for."

Unalaska Public Safety Director Jamie Sunderland was also on hand at the incident command Wednesday. He says this whole process is meant to be a collaboration.

"It isn’t that the feds come in and take over," Sunderland says. "Locals really do have a say in the matter, and that’s good to know and refreshing to see." 

And locals will see some of the action firsthand on Thursday. Crews will be testing response equipment in real life, deploying boom and other tools at the mouth of the Iliuliuk River to clean up after the hypothetical spill.