SOUNDING THE ALARM
As Howe Sound enjoys an ecological awakening, major industrial development is also gearing up in the area, pitting residents against big business. The fear is that environmental gains are now threatened by industry’s hand.
In some parts of the world, the island-studded fiord called Howe Sound would have been locked up as a national park long ago, given its astounding natural beauty on the edge of a metropolis of more than 2.5 million people.
It’s a special place where steepsided mountains plunge almost 300 metres into glacier-fed waters that are home to a wide range of marine life, including salmon, herring, whales, dolphins, porpoises, and fragile glass-sponge reefs.
But full protection is not what happened to Howe Sound.
Industry indelibly made its mark on the shoreline in 1904, with the opening of the Britannia mine, toasted as the “largest copper mine in the British Commonwealth.” The mine closed in 1974. But it lives on as a national historic site and tourist attraction clinging to a hillside and as a continuing source of so much pollution that a treatment facility was built in 2006, with a budget of $3 million a year to remove an average of 226,000 kilograms of heavy metal contaminants each year.
Over the decades, industry continued to come and go in the sound, including the Western Forest Products Woodfibre pulp mill, closed in 2006, on the same site where B.C. Sulphite Fibre Company began operations in 1912.
The place remains a contamination nightmare.
The list of nasties includes lead paint, asbestos, an old landfill that needs to be capped and closed, and some 3,000 creosote pilings that must be removed without stirring up old contaminants lurking in sediments on the ocean bottom.
“A lot of crap,” confirms Byng Giraud, who is managing construction of the proposed $1.6-billion Woodfibre liquefied natural gas facility on the old pulp grounds that would ship out 2.1 million tonnes of product per year. “You need deep pockets to take over one of these old abandoned sites. We’ve inherited all those liabilities.”
The other major industrial development gearing up along Howe Sound is the Burnco Rock Products Ltd. gravel mine at McNab Creek, a salmon spawning stream. The company promises to enhance the site to create better habitat for salmon.
Residents fiercely protective of 44-kilometre-long Howe Sound are tired of fighting one industrial project after another, but they aren’t giving up.
“We go from defeat to defeat with undiminished enthusiasm,” said Eoin Finn, co-founder of the citizens’ group My Sea to Sky.
The closure of Woodfibre pulp mill and opening of the Britannia treatment facility, along with herring habitat improvements by the community, are considered largely responsible for an ecological reawakening of the sound at all levels of the food chain. Salmon have even found their way back to Britannia Creek to spawn.
The fear is that these environmental gains are now threatened by industry’s hand. Finn is a retired partner with KPMG who lives in Kitsilano but has a property on Boyer Island, between Lions Bay and Horseshoe Bay. He would like to see Howe Sound declared a no-go zone for industry, and reserve the fiord for nature and recreational enjoyment. The sound could be managed collectively by local municipal governments, with senior governments compensating industry for lost opportunities, he suggested.
“It’s the re-industrialization of Howe Sound,” he complained.
“It’s not just NIMBY. This is a resource that all of Vancouver enjoys and the people who live up and down the sound use. They have a right not to have it re-industrialized.”
More motorists, including tourists taking side trips from Vancouver to Squamish and Whistler, are using the corridor all the time.
According to the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, traffic on the Sea to Sky Highway has increased 24 per cent — a daily average of 19,000 vehicle trips through Lions Bay and Squamish and 10,000 through Whistler — since 2009 when the province completed $600 million in highway improvements for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
INDUSTRY, TOURISM CAN COEXIST
During a Postmedia News tour of the Woodfibre site, Giraud argued that industrial operations have a long history in Howe Sound and that liquefied natural gas has a good environmental track record internationally. This project will operate on hydroelectricity from B.C. Hydro and on is an isolated stretch of the sound seven kilometres from downtown Squamish.
Unlike its pulp mill predecessor, the LNG plant also won’t be pumping pollutants into the sound.
Giraud notes that the presence of industrial activities in Burrard Inlet has not diminished Vancouver’s lure as a global tourist destination, evidence that industry and environment can work together. “I was born and raised in this province. There are lots of special and important places, but I don’t think industry and tourism and special places are incompatible.”
The project is predicted to employ about 100 workers during operation at salaries of about $100,000 a year. Some prospective employees are already showing interest in a 1,000-unit housing development proposed for Britannia, right across the sound from the mine. Residential development is also being proposed for Furry Creek, a 10-minute drive south on Highway 99.
The Woodfibre LNG project is headed by Singapore billionaire Sukanto Tanoto of Royal Golden Eagle, a man with a checkered environmental record in Asia, including pulp operations accused by Greenpeace of destroying Indonesian rainforests.
“This is not the sort of character you’d invite to be your neighbour,” Finn said. “We certainly don’t in a place like Howe Sound.”
Giraud responds that this is Canada, and Woodfibre LNG commits to meet or beat environmental requirements for its operation.
LNG accidents do happen. In 2017, a contractor was injured during a fire at a refrigerant line at a Fortis BC LNG facility on Tilbury Island in Delta. In March 2014, six workers were injured in an explosion at the Williams Northwest Pipeline facility in Plymouth, Wash. Police said it was a miracle no one died as 100-plus-kilogram pieces of steel were tossed close to 100 metres.
Critics fear that a fiery explosion at Woodfibre LNG might spark a major forest fire, with a potentially worse disaster at sea. “The consequences would be massive,” Finn said. “You’d toast Howe Sound.”
Woodfibre LNG hopes to break ground next year on a four-year construction project. KBR, an engineering and construction firm based in Houston, Texas, is expected to provide a detailed cost estimate of the project soon.
A rebound in LNG prices recently makes Woodfibre more optimistic about its operation, which would ship out three or four laden LNG tankers a month, with tug escorts to the open ocean, to Japan and China.
Shipping in Howe Sound is not without risks. A barge sank in Howe Sound near Port Mellon in early 2018, and a fuel tank on board leaked up to 200 litres of diesel fuel into the sound.
The Squamish Nation OK’d Woodfibre LNG with 25 conditions, including that the plant be air-cooled, not water-cooled, and that an economic benefit agreement be reached.
The company continues to work to resolve outstanding issues.
For a perspective on vessel traffic in Howe Sound: Squamish Terminals, which sustained major damage in a waterfront fire in 2015, receives about five cargo ships a month, mostly carrying less incendiary products such as wood pulp and steel products.
This is a resource that all of Vancouver enjoys and the people who live up and down the sound use. EOIN FINN, co-founder of citizens’ group My Sea to Sky
Additional shipping, however, affects whales by raising the potential for ship strikes and by increasing underwater noise levels.
MINING SALMON HABITAT
At the Burnco site, south of Woodfibre, a family-owned Calgary company plans to start dredging McNab Creek next year. The site is on about 70 hectares of private land and would operate for 16 years at a maximum production of 1.6 million tonnes a year. The project will include a barge-loading site to move gravel to company operations in Langley and Burnaby.
Earlier this year, B.C.’s Environmental Assessment Office supported the project despite “direct impacts from the permanent loss of fish and wildlife habitat, and some uncertainties about the time it may take for migration and offsetting to become effective.”
Critics say it’s just another example of a flawed environmental process, one that inevitably favours industry.
The 16-megawatt Box Canyon Creek run-of-river hydroelectric project — about 10 kilometres from Port Mellon pulp mill near Gibsons, the last remaining such operation in the sound — went ahead without a full environmental assessment because it was not large enough to require one. The Elemental Energy Inc. project, partnered with Squamish First Nation, launched in 2016.
The Burnco fish mitigation plan calls for a net gain of more than 700 square metres of in-stream habitat and 21,209 square metres of riparian habitat to the south of the mine site.
While supporting the project, the Environmental Assessment Office noted: “Socio-economic impacts would be most noticeable in areas adjacent to the mine, where a number of effects may occur concurrently, such as changes to air quality, noise levels, visual quality and real estate values.”
Critics sympathize with the owners of about 17 nearby recreational homes who came here for the peace and beauty.
“It’s angered a lot of people,” Finn said. “Given how rich the B.C. coastline is in gravel deposits, why do they have to dig up a salmon bearing stream?”
Derek Holmes, B.C. land and resource manager for Burnco, said McNab Creek has several attractive attributes, including proximity to markets. “There are relatively few neighbours, it looks like it has the quality of sand and gravel deposits required for concrete, asphalt and general construction, and it seems large enough to be economically viable.
“It’s easy to say no to everything, and gravel seems to be one of those hot topics, but I don’t think people realize how much they use gravel, and how ubiquitous it is in our society. I’m curious to know how people … think you can do construction without it. Nobody wants it close to where they live or recreate. It’s a tough balance.”
Finn doesn’t toss a wet blanket on all industrial operations. He believes logging practices have come a long way, employing smaller and more creative clearcuts that help to protect viewscapes. “It’s a renewable resource and it’s improved greatly,” he said, adding that “logging is an industry that’s been part of the B.C. coast for a long time.”
Logging operations can also hurt the marine environment. Environment Canada guidelines on log storage and handling warn such operations can cause local environmental damage if wood waste, such as bark and chips, get into the water. They can smother water plants, benthic invertebrates and fish eggs and also reduce the living space for juvenile fish.
Work is underway to document important marine sites that could be damaged by development.
Willem Van Riet, a spatial analyst for the David Suzuki Foundation, is working with the Vancouver Aquarium’s Coastal Ocean Research Institute on a conservation assessment, a reference guide to the most important and vulnerable sites in the sound. Started in June 2017, the assessment is scheduled for completion this September. “We want to identify ecologically unique areas, then lobby for their protection” Riet said. The results will be available online.
Ecological features include plant communities (kelp, eel grass and seaweed), important areas for marine life (fish, birds, mammals, invertebrates and reptiles), the physical environment (bathymetry, seabed classification, tides and currents), and marine use and activities (traditional uses and value, recreation, leases and harvesting ).
Closer to Squamish, industrial impacts assume an unlikely face.
The Squamish Spit, a long dike or “training dike” created for a coal port that never happened in the 1970s, is a popular area for wind sports. Reconfiguration of the dike, including a bridge, is under discussion to improve the area for juvenile salmon between the Squamish River and Squamish estuary, with a new access point for wind sports.
The Squamish River Watershed Society has received about $1.5 million from the federal Oceans Protection Plan, said Randall Lewis, environmental adviser for the Squamish First Nation. Currently, juvenile salmon coming down the Squamish River are shot out into the salt water rather than adjusting slowly to salt water life in the estuary. “The main objective is the health and safety of the young fry — that’s number 1,” Lewis said.
A NEW SUSTAINABLE VISION
One might think there is no common ground to be found between conservationists and industry — but that’s not entirely true.
Ruth Simons, a former Lions Bay councillor who heads the Future of Howe Sound Society, says it’s time for a new way of thinking, a holistic approach that considers cumulative impacts — a big-picture view, starting now and into the future.
One option is to officially designate Howe Sound a UNESCO biosphere reserve, similar to ClayoquotSoundandMountArrowsmith, both on Vancouver Island. Planning has been going on for two years, with the aim of submitting the official nomination in 2018.
UNESCO says that a biosphere reserve, in part, “promotes solutions reconciling the conservation of biodiversity with its sustainable use” including “conflict prevention and management of biodiversity.”
The label cannot block development — that isn’t Simons’ goal — but it would set a tone for sustainability, letting industry and anyone who seeks to develop know that they are entering a special area that requires extra attention.
“It would support more research and education,” adds Simons, who regularly patrols the sound in her eight-metre power boat. “And anyone who came here would have an indication of what to expect.”
Giraud says he could live with the designation, noting that sustainable logging continues in Clayoquot Sound. “A biosphere is not a park,” he said. “We feel we could be compatible.”
B.C.’s Ministry of Forests, Lands, Natural Resource Operations and Rural Development is completing assessment reports on the cumulative effects of human activities on different natural resources around Howe Sound: aquatic ecosystems, visual-quality old-growth forests, forest biodiversity, grizzly bears, Roosevelt elk, and marbled murrelets. They are due for release this fall, and will likely set off a new debate on the future of Howe Sound.
A biosphere is not a park. We feel we could be compatible.
BYNG GIRAUD, Woodfibre LNG