LandKeepers News Archive
For Band, Sunken Ferry a Reminder of Oil-Tanker Risks
March 18 2010 | News Articles | Times Colonist
Every day, a fellow boats out from Hartley Bay to Gil Island to look for signs of fuel leaking up from the sunken Queen of the North. It’s not uncommon to find a sheen on the water, maybe a litre or two.
Nothing like the great, stinking lake of diesel that fouled the surface after the ferry sank on March 22, 2006. That spill made such a mess that it was two years before Marven Robinson felt it safe to harvest cockles and clams from nearby beds.
Yet the damage done by the ferry sinking pales in comparison to what would happen if a giant oil tanker spilled its load, which is why Robinson is fearful of a proposal to build a pipeline from Alberta to Kitimat.
“The whole Gitga’at First Nation is opposed to the pipeline and the tanker traffic it will bring,” he says, on the phone from Hartley Bay, where he is a band councillor.
Robinson was surprised by this week’s out-of-the-blue news that a B.C. Ferries crew member had been charged criminally in the Queen of the North sinking, in which two passengers died. Robinson remembers that night well, being one of the 22 Hartley Bay men who jumped in their boats and sped 16 kilometres through the dark to help the 99 surviving passengers and crew.
No one knows how much, if any, fuel remains entombed on the ferry, 430 metres down. The Queen of the North had a capacity of 220,000 litres of diesel and 20,000 of light oil.
That’s a drop in the ocean compared to the 525,000 barrels of petroleum that would be pumped onto tankers if Enbridge’s $4.5-billion Northern Gateway project is approved. The proposal would see twin pipelines carry Alberta petroleum 1,170 kilometres to a new marine terminal at Kitimat, and condensate — a kerosene-like thinning agent — sent from the coast to the oil patch.
The National Energy Board and Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency have agreed to a joint review process, though an official project application from Enbridge has yet to be received. The company says that if approved, Northern Gateway would create 4,000 construction jobs. Business groups support the proposal. Environmental groups do not. Nor do the Gitga’at — “People of the Cane” — through whose front parlour the tankers would pass.
The Gitga’at band has about 700 members, 180 of whom live in Hartley Bay. The community sits near the confluence of Grenville Channel — which leads to Prince Rupert, 140 kilometres to the north — and Douglas Channel, which ends at Kitimat, 80 kilometres to the northeast.
The village is accessible only by floatplane or boat. No roads, no cars and trucks, just ATVs rattling along raised wooden boardwalks. The band has an ambitious plan to reduce its energy consumption, doing everything from insulating home hot-water tanks to being smarter about the way it lights its marina to replacing the village’s diesel generators with a small-scale hydro project. “We’re trying to be the greenest community in Canada,” Robinson says. “Shoving tanker traffic in there would just ruin it.”
The band’s greatest fear is an Exxon Valdez-style spill. Enbridge argues that risk can be managed, that 1,500 tankers carrying petrochemicals have safely entered Kitimat Harbour in the past quarter century. Tankers pass the Victoria waterfront all the time. Robinson is still worried. With more than 300 tankers a year expected to pass Hartley Bay post-pipeline, an accident seems inevitable, he says. “It’s not a matter of if it will happen, it’s a matter of when.”
He heard of an incident this winter in which a large ship had to return to Kitimat after hitting rocks and punching in its bow.
Besides, an oil spill isn’t the only threat, he says. The band worries about the wash thrown up by giant tankers, concerned the constant traffic will disrupt the delicate interconnectivity of nature — and the food supply.
With no store in Hartley Bay, the Gitga’at hunt deer, moose and seal, fish for salmon, halibut, crab and herring, and gather mussels, seaweed and cucumbers. “The food and resources that we depend on are at our doorstep,” Robinson says. “We can’t just go to the supermarket.”
To the Gitga’at, the risk is too great. And all they need to confirm their fears is the Queen of the North, 430 metres below the surface.
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