Spills need co-ordinated action
‘Pollution is everybody’s responsibility,’ attendees hear
The Canadian Coast Guard has learned from the bunker fuel leak, from the grain ship Marathassa in English Bay, the importance of keeping local communities informed on emergency responses, assistant commissioner Roger Girouard said Wednesday.
“Cleaning the oil is the easy part,” Girouard said in an interview at a Vancouver conference on spill prevention and response. “Isn’t that ironic?”
A sailor first reported an oil slick to Port Metro Vancouver on April 8 at about 5 p.m. City of Vancouver officials complained they were not informed of the slick until 6 a.m. April 9. At least 2,700 litres of bunker fuel leaked from the ship, which was on its maiden voyage, fouling wildlife and shorelines. A federal investigation continues. Victoria-based Girouard said the organizational side of the spill response presented challenges,” adding Vancouver is a “very complex constituency” with a “high level of emotion around this issue.”
“The key for Vancouver in the future is a co-ordinated approach where everyone understands ‘incident command’ and knows their piece of it,” he said.
Girouard added that the federal government needs to hear from those who want to be part of the process, including city officials and First Nations. “To be served the meal, you have to roll up your sleeves and be ready to serve yourself. Pollution is everybody’s responsibility.”
He said the coast guard is a “response organization, not a civic organization,” but is prepared to take a leadership role in speaking with the province and city to come up with a way to improve the situation in future. “We need a conversation about expectations and participation.”
Al Richmond, first vice-president of the Union of B.C. Municipalities, gave credit to the B.C. government for notifying local officials within 2½ to three hours after the Mount Polley mine disaster, which occurred at a challenging time in the early hours of the B.C. Day holiday in August 2014.
“That’s excellent, considering where the incident happened,” he said. “They responded as quickly as they could.”
He said the Marathassa experience, in comparison, fell far short of expectations, adding there’s also been a lack of federal involvement in monitoring fish habitat in response to the Mount Polley tailings pond breach.
Richmond said municipalities want a B.C.-based spills contingency fund, fully funded by industry, to clean up oil spills, including those where the polluter cannot be identified, as well as to pay for ecosystem restoration, research on spill cleanup methods and to increase preparedness.
Meanwhile, directional drilling methods are allowing access to more oil and thereby increasing the amount of oil shipped by rail in North America, noted Nancy Kinner, a professor at the Coastal Response Research Centre at the University of New Hampshire.
While it can be challenging to get approval for a new oil pipeline, rail cars offer lower capital investment and geographic flexibility, she told the conference.
Oil from the Bakken formation in the Williston basin of North Dakota is a lighter crude and more volatile; Alberta oilsands are bitumen-based, thicker and need to be diluted with other petroleum products to move through pipelines. Movement of Williston oil by rail in the U.S. has increased to 68 per cent in 2013 from six per cent in 2010, Kinner said.
A 120-car train can carry 84,000 barrels of oil. The risk of a larger spill is greater in a pipeline than from a rail car carrying a limited volume, she noted.
Transport Canada reports that railways hauled 174,257 carloads containing 14.8 million tonnes of oil Canada-wide in 2014 — up from 144 carloads containing about 8,000 tonnes in 2009.
The department is leading an “area response planning” pilot project in four regions of Canada, including the Strait of Georgia/Juan de Fuca Strait.
The project seeks to tailor response plans and cleanup resources for spills based on the geography of a region, its tanker traffic, and its environmental conditions.
Almost 500 people are attending the Clean Pacific conference, sponsored by the Pacific States/ B.C. Oil Spill Task Force.