Greg Beck served in the Royal Australian Navy as signalman for 20 years from 1961 until 1981 where he attained the rank of Petty Officer prior to joining the Australian Public Service.  He has been ORCA’s Training Consultant since 2004.

From 1991 until his retirement in 2002 he was engaged full time on oil spill related matters with AMSA as the Authority’s Operations and Training Coordinator.

From 1991 until 2002 Mr Beck dealt with operational matters as AMSA’s marine pollution unit’s first point of contact during office hours and coordinated day-to-day activities in assessing and disseminating marine pollution incident reports and initiating follow up action.  This included activation of National Plan response arrangements when required.

Mr Beck either attended or was involved in most major oil spill incidents in Australia during his tenure as Operations and Training Coordinator.  In 1997 he was a member of a six-person Australian team that travelled overseas to support oil spill response operations following a collision off Singapore in 1997.

Mr Beck coordinated AMSA’s National Plan training activities and liaised with State/NT government and industry personnel in coordinating and promulgating National Plan training activities on a yearly basis.  For six years he was Chair of the National Plan Training Working Group.

As AMSA’s Operations and Training Coordinator he developed new training programmes and enhanced a range of existing training programmes.  He delivered equipment operator, shoreline cleanup, on-scene coordinator and State marine pollution controller workshops and participated in a number of biennial National Plan exercises as well as State and industry exercises as either a participant or umpire.

In presenting equipment operator courses Mr Beck had responsibility for deploying a significant range of spill response equipment.  As the training presenter he demonstrated an excellent knowledge of the equipment that he was demonstrating.

Mr Beck’s acknowledged training experience saw him travel to New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Thailand and Brunei Darussalam to either develop or conduct training courses.

Mr Beck has excellent writing skills and these were used to good effect between 1991 and 2002 as he developed a range of reports, manuals and plans associated with marine environment protection matters.

Greg is a member of ORCA’s oil spill response Incident Management Team (IMT) that is available nationwide to provide support to government and industry agencies affected by a major oil spill.