Kills and Spills Team (KAST)

Thirty Years of Investigating Fish and Wildlife Kills and Pollution in Texas

Methods

In 1997 the Kills and Spills Team worked to enter over 4500 historical kill and spill incident reports into a custom-designed Microsoft Access database application known as PRISM (Pollution Response Incident and Species Mortality). The type of information stored in PRISM is listed in Table 1.

Using Microsoft Access’ built-in query functions, the PRISM database was searched for the period of record (1958-1997) to categorize and summarize kill and spill reports. Some data were exported to Microsoft Excel for manipulation and charting.

Table 1. Selected data fields in the PRISM database.

Database Fields	Type of Data
Incident type (fish kill, wildlife kill, both fish and wildlife kill, pollution complaint, other)	categorical
Start and end date	date
Habitat type(s) and size(s) affected	categorical
How and when we were notified and who investigated	date and categorical
County(ies) involved	categorical
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality water quality segment(s) involved	categorical
Location name (usually a water body name)	text
Beginning and ending location	latitude and longitude
Source(s) and cause(s) of the incident, including "source action" such as "spill"	categorical
Species, size(s), and number(s) killed in cases involving kills	categorical and numerical
Active compound(s) including volume and units	text
Alleged responsible party(ies)	text
Type of count of dead organisms	categorical
Reason for no count	categorical
Total number of organisms killed	number
Monetary restitution value of organisms killed	currency
Event description	text
Notification notes (sometimes includes additional information about persons notifying or investigating the incident)	text
Location notes (sometimes includes additional information about location of the incident)	text
Cause notes (sometimes includes additional information about sources and causes of the incident)	text
Alleged responsible party notes (sometimes includes additional information about the alleged responsible party(ies)	text

Results and Discussion