Boat-load of debate over tankers

Environmentalists say a 34-year-old moratorium is being ignored; Transport Canada denies it exists

Jack Knox
Victoria Times-Colonist
Sunday, July 2, 2006

The Exxon Valdez sits on Bligh Reef in Prince
William Sound, Alaska, after the giant tanker ran
aground in March 1989, spilling an estimated
41.6 milliton litres of crude oil.
Al Grillo/CanWest News Service

Moratorium? What moratorium? Environmentalists are charging the federal government with ignoring its own 34-year-old ban on oil tankers in B.C.'s inside waters, opening our coast to an Exxon Valdez-type spill.

No way, replies Transport Canada. No such moratorium exists.

What set off this fuss was the appearance last weekend of a tanker carrying 350,000 barrels of condensate - an oil-diluting fluid - to Kitimat, where the cargo was offloaded for shipment by train to Alberta. The route goes 166 kilometres up Douglas Channel, right past the spot where the Queen of the North sank in March.

This, say a variety of green groups, contravenes a moratorium that since 1972 has kept oil tankers out of Dixon Entrance, Hecate Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound.

No, no, replies Transport Canada, what we actually have is a voluntary exclusion zone that keeps crude-oil tankers out of those waters as they travel between Alaska and the continental U.S. The prohibition doesn't apply to such ships using northern B.C. ports.

North-south, east-west, what's the difference, asks Jennifer Lash, executive director of the Living Oceans Society, up in Sointula, off northern Vancouver Island.

If a tanker cracks up in the narrow, twisting channels of B.C.'s north coast, we're hooped. "It doesn't matter which direction it's going in."

And we ain't seen nothing yet. A handful of companies have separate proposals to run pipelines to the northern B.C. coast, meaning deep-sea tankers would, for the first time, be a regular sight.

The leading proposal appears to come from Enbridge Inc., which wants to build a $4-billion, 1,150 kilometre twin pipeline between Kitimat and northern Alberta. One line would send condensate east, the other would carry tarsands oil west to the coast, where it would be loaded onto ships bound for the U.S. and Asia.

A variety of environmental groups - Living Oceans, the Georgia Strait Alliance, West Coast Environmental Law and the Sierra Club among them - are upset, and don't buy the idea that a moratorium doesn't exist. Lash points to two recent polls showing 75 per cent of British Columbians want oil tankers kept out of the north coast's inside waters. "What we would like to see is the government confirm the moratorium and respect what people want to see," says Lash.

Don't know if that will happen. If Alaska tankers avoid the inside waters, it's because they have the alternative of going around the outside of Vancouver Island. No such option exists for those who want to ship the Alberta oil. Still, Transport Canada says it is taking a hard look at the implications of the Kitimat proposals.

All this worries Fred Felleman of Seattle's Ocean Advocates. Typically, he says, safety measures don't keep up to increases in marine-shipping capacity - not, at least, until something bad happens. "The only time we get to advance the score is on the heels of a mistake."

And it's been a while since we have suffered such a calamity. This coast hasn't seen an Exxon Valdez-type disaster since, well, the Exxon Valdez broke apart off Alaska in 1989. Vancouver Island's last real taste of oil was in 1991, when the Japanese fishboat Tenyo Maru collided with a Chineses freighter at the mouth of Juan de Fuca Strait. Worse was 1988, when a fuel barge sank off Grays Harbor, Wash. That was 250 kilometres form the Island, but thick gunk still fouled the shoreline from Nootka Sound to Sooke.

Still, oil tankers, the same ones that people are worried about in the Inside Passage, go plowing past our front door all the time without blackening our beaches.

Supertankers from Alaska sail down the outside of Vancouver Island en route to California. Almost 600 times last year, medium-sized tankers passed Victoria as they sailed down Juan de Fuca Strait to unload crude at Puget Sound, Cherry Point, and Anacortes, Wash., according to that state's Department of Ecology. Another 50 were bound for Canadian ports. Countless fuel barges carrying refined oil get dragged down the strait in the other direction, bound for as far as San Francisco. Once a week, a bright orange tanker delivers refined product from the Lower Mainland to Vancouver Island.

It's only going to get busier. We keep hearing of trade volumes tripling in the next 10 to 20 years, with jumbo-sized container ships filling the void. A big shipping terminal is proposed for Cherry Point. Up near Kitimat, the new container port at Prince Rupert is supposed to handle as much volume by 2010 as Vancouver takes today. Felleman expects pressure to allow supertankers in Juan de Fuca Strait once oil starts coming from Russia.

A single tanker sailing into Kitimat seems like a drop in the ocean.

jknox@tc.canwest.com