The recent oil spill incidents such as oil rig blow up on 20th April, 2010 at Gulf of Mexico and ship accident on 7th August, 2010 at Mumbai has drawn attention of coastal managers to adopt proactive approach to manage the oil spills in marine environment. The oil spill in marine water has direct impact on coastal resources and community. Prep-aration of Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) map is the first step to assess the potential impact of an oil spill and minimize the damage of coastal resources. In this paper an attempt made to prepare an ESI map for sensitivity to oil spills of Kakinada coast. The Kakinada coast is subjected to high threaten to oil spill because of port, off shore oil explo-ration, dense mangrove forest and many industrial activities. Mapping the coastal resources, shoreline and coastal struc-tures was carried out using Satellite images and GIS tech-nology. The dataset used for the study include high resolu-tion CARTOSAT-1 PAN (2007) image of 2.5 m resolution and LANDSAT ETM (2001) image of 30 m resolution. The Digital Image Processing software (ERDAS) & GIS soft-ware (ARCGIS 10) used for the satellite image processing and feature extractions. The coastal features classified into three major categories as: Biological, Human and Habitat. Mapping carried out upto 2 km into the land from shoreline. Coastal resources identified, mapped and extracted from satellite image by Supervised Classification technique with 83% accuracy. The important resources classified into man-grove, mudflat, coastal structure (Break Water, Jetty and Port), sandy beach, saltpan, tidal flats, etc. The sensitivity of shore was ranked as low to high (1 = low sensitivity; 10 = high sensitivity) based on geomorphology of Kakinada coast using NOAA standards (sensitivity to oil, ease of clean up, etc). The ESI map prepared at 1:25,000 scale and digital database have been generated for the Kakinada coast. The ESI maps are useful to the oil spill responders, coastal man-agers and contingency planners....
Authors: Sriganesh. J, Kankara. R. S., and Venkatachalapathy. R.