http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/trans-mountain-pipeline-plan-could-be-a-casualty-of-slow-spill-response/article24024428/
[images in on-line article]
Trans Mountain Pipeline plan could be a casualty of slow spill response
MARK HUME
VANCOUVER — The Globe and Mail
Published Sunday, Apr. 19 2015, 10:39 PM EDT
Last updated Sunday, Apr. 19 2015, 10:39 PM EDT
A drop of oil the size of a dime can kill a sea bird. Can 16 barrels of
oil, spilled in one of Canada’s most beautiful ports, kill a pipeline?
It’s beginning to look like maybe it can, when the cleanup response is
unnervingly slow, and the waters despoiled surround Stanley Park.
A little more than a week ago, the cargo vessel Marathassa accidentally
discharged about 2,700 litres of oil while at anchor in English Bay.
The ship was so close to the city’s shores that in about 15 minutes you
could have rowed there from the Jericho Sailing Centre, but it would
take more than 12 hours for oil spill responders to surround the vessel
with a containment boom. The slow response, and the almost comical
breakdown in communications between the Coast Guard and a very concerned
public, may well have serious repercussions for Kinder Morgan’s proposed
Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project.
The link between the spill and the proposed pipeline is a simple one for
British Columbians to make. If the pipeline goes ahead, the amount of
oil transported to Vancouver will triple to 890,000 barrels a day,
raising the likelihood that there will be more spills, perhaps much
larger than the Marathassa incident.
With such an important energy project looming in the background, and a
federal election on the horizon, you can understand why the spill took
on political overtones. B.C. Mayor Gregor Robertson was on the beaches
for a news conference the day after to say he wasn’t happy with the slow
response. Premier Christy Clark was quick to follow.
And that prompted the federal government to go into damage control,
issuing a flurry of statements about how good the cleanup effort had
really been.
“Even before most British Columbians woke up, the boom was completely
surrounding the suspect vessel,” said Coast Guard Commissioner Jody
Thomas, who described the response as “exceptional by international
standards.”
Was it?
Recreational boaters became aware of the spill at about 4:45 p.m. and
within 15 minutes made calls to alert authorities. One of those boaters,
Rob O’Dea, has said the Coast Guard called him back on his cell at 5:08,
and he confirmed he was bobbing alongside an oil slick that was at least
a half-kilometre long. They assured him a crew was responding. But when
he headed into harbour at 7:30 p.m., passing by the stern of the
Marathassa where crew members were frantically trying to dip up globs of
oil with buckets, he couldn’t see any cleanup boats.
According to the Coast Guard’s account, Western Canada Marine Response
Corp., the agency responsible for responding under directions of the
Coast Guard, was notified at 8:06 and arrived on scene at 9:20. The
leaking Marathassa wasn’t completely boomed off until 5:53 a.m. – so
that’s more than 12 hours after the Coast Guard was first alerted.
According to standards established by Transport Canada, if a spill of up
to 1,000 barrels takes place in the designated waters of the Port of
Vancouver, cleanup crews are to be deployed in six hours. But under the
regulations, the designated waters extend 80 kilometres from the
harbour. So it should take six hours to get to the most distant limits,
and common sense tells you they should have got to the Marathassa faster
than that.
The communications response was also lacking. The City of Vancouver
wasn’t informed until 12 hours after the spill was reported. Moving
crews and boats on to the water and setting containment booms might take
hours, but calling the city should take seconds.
Throughout the incident, the media were given too little information,
often too late. One end-of-day update came so late it was really an
end-of-yesterday update, and an invitation for media to attend a
technical briefing came 16 minutes before the event started.
Had the Coast Guard responded to the Marathassa oil spill that quickly,
it really would have been world class. Instead, the response was so slow
it left politicians fuming and British Columbians increasingly nervous
about the prospects of more oil transiting Vancouver’s scenic harbour.
_______________________________________________
Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list
Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org
http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel