Environmental infractions not addressed, survey says

EDMONTON — A survey of thousands of environmental problems in Alberta’s oilsands attacks the province’s claims to having strict control over the industry’s environmental impact.

Fewer than one per cent of likely environmental infractions have drawn any enforcement, says the survey. It also says the province’s records are incomplete and riddled with errors, so there is no way to really understand industry’s impact on the region.

And the authors found the same problems recurring time and time again, suggesting environmental improvement in some areas isn’t happening.

“When you’ve looked at thousands of these records, what we’re seeing is the tip of the iceberg,” said Kevin Timoney, a biologist and environmental consultant who is a co-author.

The Alberta government disputes the findings.

The genesis of the 677-page report — which is not published in an academic journal but has been peer-reviewed —was in 2008, when Timoney was working in Alberta Environment’s data library in Edmonton. He came across shelves of records that appeared to contain details of breaches of environmental regulations and conditions that hadn’t been publicly released.

When library staff told him the records were off-limits, Timoney and Peter Lee, of Global Forest Watch, decided to find out what was in them. Through an epic series of Freedom of Information filings, they eventually compiled a list of 9,262 infractions since 1996 — everything from spills into the Athabasca River to excessive smokestack emissions to the discovery of random waste dumps in the bush.

Just as troubling as the quantity of the files is their quality.

“It was evident that there were thousands of incidents the public didn’t know anything about,” Timoney said. “(But) it’s exceedingly difficult to do anything with them because they basically just give you a pile of paper.”

The files were generated through industry self-reporting and public complaints.

“The system does not provide timely and accurate data,” the report concludes. “The number of incidents and the analyses of incident rates should be viewed as minimum estimates.”

Eventually, however, patterns emerged.

Almost two-thirds of the contraventions concerned air quality, most often exceedances of the hourly limits imposed on oilsands facilities for emissions of gases such as sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide — most of them from the same facilities. Almost one in five was “no impact,” usually failures to report data or meet other regulatory requirements.

Water was involved in about seven per cent of the infractions. Municipal and land issues made up just over one per cent.

Consequences for the exceedances were few, the survey found.

Of the total number of incidents, about 4,000 were reported as “alleged contraventions” — something that broke a facility’s licence conditions.

Since 1996, the Alberta government has taken enforcement action in 37 of those cases for an enforcement rate of 0.9 per cent.

By comparison, the study found the U.S. had an average enforcement rate of Clean Water Act violations of 8.2 per cent — nine times higher than Alberta.

Provincial fines, despite high-profile sanctions such as a $3-million penalty levied on Syncrude for ducks that died i n its tailings pond, tended to be low. The median fine was $4,500.

Alberta Environment spokespeople challenged the report’s findings.

Wayne Wood, press secretary to Environment Minister Diana McQueen, said because the rules oblige companies to report every exceedence, files are created for even the smallest infractions.

“They could be incidents that don’t actually require any kind of regulatory enforcement, certainly not prosecution,” Wood said.

Department spokeswoman Nikki Booth said the information in the report was drawn from a log book that was never meant to be used by the public to generate a database. Department staff who work with the files are familiar enough with them to draw reliable conclusions, she said.

“Having people from the public coming in and searching the database, it just wasn’t intended for that,” she said.

Timoney asks how the government can say it is protecting the environment when it has such spotty records.

“It suggests to me that there’s a disconnect between what the approval is stating and what the industry is doing,” he said.

There are thousands of incidents the public didn’t know anything about KEVIN TIMONEY