| |
Posted May 2, 2019, 6:04 AM
|
|
retro_orange
|
|
Join Date: Sep 2014
Location: East Van
Posts: 2,029
|
|
Quote:
Originally Posted by Millennium2002
(Sorry if this post is leaning political...)
I see Alberta politics at work again... Their new premier has bought into and spreading the line that we only have ourselves to blame for high gas prices due to our desire to protect our coastlines and livelihoods. And yet I have the same concerns as retro_orange: that there will be an endless road of excuses towards justifying high gas prices whether or not any new oil pipeline actually goes ahead.
Personally, I would not mind an oil pipeline from Alberta to the BC coast (e.g. Prince Rupert or Vancouver), but there has to be some meaningful way of protecting or insuring our rivers and coasts against any spills that may occur. This is because a sizeable chunk of local jobs (tourism and fisheries) depend heavily on a clean environment and ecosystem. And yet, neither Alberta or the federal government seem to be very interested in offering adequate protection or insurance... it's as if they know it will cost a disproportionate fortune to us and would rather pretend to be blind to the consequences.
IIRC, for the Enbridge Gateway project, only ~$1.5 billion was guaranteed to be paid to BC over the 30-year lifetime of the pipeline; the rest was dependent on federal government transfers. I find the guaranteed amount to be super low and kind of offensive actually... The cost of the Exxon Valdez spill was double / triple that. The oil industry's historical track record in regards to oil spill response and paying out liabilities is simply atrocious across the board; thus it's almost a given that a spill will occur if any new or expanded pipeline is built.
|
 Gasoline and Oil talk is a big part of politics in Canada. If anything this thread should be moved to the politics section.
It's just a matter of time and cost cutting by management that will eventually result in a major oil spill. Who here remembers the pipeline blowout in Burnaby from a few years ago? Not only is there the potential for it to be 12X the size but we were just lucky there was no ignition of the spilled oil which would have turned into a major disaster for Burnaby at the pipelines current rate of flow.
A great article of what happened in 2007, I bolded important parts and removed a bunch of storyline as it's long and rambling but a good read, linked below
Quote:
The day oil rained down on Burnaby
Ten years ago this week, an excavator ruptured a pipeline and sent crude oil shooting into the sky. In this report, we look back on that day and its aftermath
Grant Granger / Burnaby NowJuly 21, 2017
 The oil was thick and heavy on Belcarra Drive following a pipeline puncture on nearby Inlet Drive on July 24, 2007.
Photograph By File photo
Hatch had no clue there was an oil pipeline running so close to the home she’d lived in since 1976. “When the firefighter came and told me I had to evacuate immediately and said there had been an oil spill, I had no idea what that meant,” says Hatch a decade later. She soon found out.
Hearing “oil pipeline” and “rupture” in the same sentence was a red flag alerting him to the dire seriousness of the situation.
She learned later it wasn’t a good idea to be driving a car during an oil spill. You weren’t even supposed to be turning on an engine for fear of sparking a fire.
“The odour of the oil was quite powerful, and it was very difficult for people to even get close to the scene,” he says.
Some of the delay in stopping the flow, the report concluded, was attributed to a mixup in Kinder Morgan’s monitoring centre.
“They closed a valve (at the dock) that should not have been closed, and they left a valve open that should have been closed which was at the tank farm terminal,” says Chu.
“That took a while for them to realize the errors and the mistakes, and when they applied the correct procedures a lot of the homes were already covered with oil and it had started flowing down the streets and down the storm drains into the inlet.”
Residents evacuated
An estimated 225 residents were affected directly or indirectly and, like Hatch, were advised to leave the area. A reception area was set up at Confederation Park and accommodation arranged, if needed.
According to Kinder Morgan, 101 evacuees belonging to 42 families spent the night of July 24, 2007 somewhere other than home.
Other neighbours, she says, couldn’t return for months because they happened to have their windows open when the oil started spewing, contaminating the interiors of their homes.
Shore birds affected
The TSB report said: “The crude oil seeped into the surrounding soil, storm drains, and sewer lines. The Barnet Highway was closed for several days. Moving through the storm drain system, the crude oil eventually reached the marine waters of Burrard Inlet where it began to spread further into the inlet through wind and tide action. Burrard Inlet’s marine environment and approximately 1,200 metres of shoreline were affected by the crude oil spill. A number of shore birds were contaminated after coming into contact with the oil.”
Red Zone
For several months, Hatch had arborists, landscapers, health researchers, insurance adjusters and bureaucrats tramping on her property. Her soil and grass was removed and replaced. Most of her plants were taken away or severely pruned.
Most of the work was carried out by contractors hired by Kinder Morgan. After getting new dirt, sod and plants, a worker showed up to remove and replace her gutters. She was distressed when he started throwing the old gutters, still containing oil, on her new, clean lawn and remediated dirt.
Hatch says it took a couple of years to make sure the remediation was safe.
Her insurance company, however, was a different matter when it came to the house.
“Some people in the neighbourhood, I know they had their insurance company walk away from them, and Kinder Morgan paid for them,” Then she discovered there was even another bureaucratic layer above that.
“All of this I ended up having to do myself. I was the one that had to deal with all the workers that came. You never knew when they’d come; they’d arrive just out of the blue,” she says. “I always had to be vigilant, I couldn’t just say A-OK, everything’s going to be fine. I had to do my own work in order to protect my property, my children, my dog.”
She estimates it took about 30 months to get the physical property back to its original state. “But your sense of safety, that was shattered.”
Published reports say Kinder Morgan spent $15 million in remediation costs and millions more for personal property damage. Kinder Morgan says eight residential properties were classified as being heavily oiled, 15 as moderately oiled and 21 as lightly oiled.
Hadden says the spill was relatively small compared to other North American incidents. But, as real estate agents say, it was all about location, location, location.
“Because of its location, it certainly had huge impacts,” he says. “Because the oil itself got into the storm drain system and then into the inlet, it then became a marine spill.”
Residents moving on
Although it’s a decade later, Hatch says many residents just want to put the rupture behind them.
“A lot of people don’t want to (talk about it),” she says. “There are a few people who actually just want to forget it, they don’t want to think about it anymore, they just want it to go away. Then there’s others, like me, who are still learning more and still try to help, if we can, to raise awareness and educate. For me, I never realized the bigger picture of global warming, and that’s all been part of what I’ve learned for myself.”
Just down the back lane from her place, Hatch has a neighbour who is moving to the West Kootenays and is representative of a different attitude. A lot of oil went down the lane’s storm drain before it got to the house he owned, so it only suffered a “salt and pepper” look to it.
“You can’t stress over those things. They’ll clean it up, they’ll fix it,” he shrugs, declining to give his full name.
Two other families contacted by the NOW who had their homes sprayed by the oil politely declined interviews. Some don’t live there anymore, but that’s not necessarily due to the spill.
Health questions
Since the rupture, Hatch has survived a breast cancer scare. During her treatment she was told there is a higher proportion of residents in the area with cancer. But, she admits, it’s difficult to determine how much of a role, if any, the rupture played in those findings. After all, Westridge has had a cluster of refineries nearby in the past and the neighbourhood is close to a heavily used commuter route.
As for the environment, a study by Stantec commissioned by Kinder Morgan in 2012 says a long-term monitoring program that began in 2008 shows “recovery endpoints” for water, intertidal sediment, crabs, subtitle sediment and fucus (brown algae) have been met. But “there are residual levels of contamination in mussels that have not yet met the agreed upon endpoint levels.”
Keeping watch
One reason Hatch has stuck around is to help protect her community.
When Kinder Morgan announced its expansion plans a few years ago, she didn’t hesitate in learning more and joined Burnaby Residents Opposed to Kinder Morgan Expansion.
In her mind, the issue has brought up the ghosts of 2007.
“It does, because that was human error. I know they are trying to make this as safe a facility as possible, but human error often plays into mistakes being made,” says Hatch. “Whether you agree with it or not, it isn’t a good thing to have in a densely populated neighbourhood.”
Chu and the City of Burnaby are strongly opposed to the proposal. He acknowledges the company has sophisticated systems that can detect the rate of oil flow anywhere along the pipeline that help to avert disaster.
“But despite state-of-the-art technology, human errors do occur. And human errors in record drawings and emergency procedures are something that you see. Not because of the failure of the system technology per se, but it was one error, that led to another, which resulted in significant damage to the environment and to the neighbourhood,” he says.
“It was a wake-up call. Not that we weren’t worried about pipeline safety before, but it even heightened the awareness of the pipeline in the urban environment.
|
https://www.burnabynow.com/news/the-day-oil-rained-down-on-burnaby-1.21287293
|
|
|
Prev
Linear Mode
