Simulations highlight risk of oil disaster

New computer model tracks spread of potential spills, impact on salmon and wildlife

Try the animations and read more at the Living Oceans Society website:www.livingoceans.org.

Mark Hume
Globe and Mail
September 27, 2007

VANCOUVER -- A computer model developed in the United States to track oil spills shows what will happen if tankers go down, or an offshore well starts to leak, on British Columbia's rugged and beautiful coastline.

It's not a pretty sight. The animated program illustrates spills drifting out like dark clouds through salmon, seabird and mammal habitats to engulf the Queen Charlotte Islands and spread along mainland beaches of the Great Bear rain forest.

"It will be devastating," said Oonagh O'Connor, energy campaign manager for the Living Oceans Society, a non-profit group that contracted a private environmental consulting firm to develop the model for specific scenarios in B.C.

The model used data from the federal government's Institute of Ocean Sciences on winds, tides, water depths and lunar and solar influences. It identified possible accident sites using Transport Canada studies that plotted shipping hazards on possible tanker routes.

Ms. O'Connor said the model makes it clear that widespread damage will occur on some of the most important areas on B.C.'s coast.

An oil spill could hit the United Nations World Heritage site at Ninstints, or foul the shoreline of Princess Royal Island, which is home to populations of rare, white-coated black bears.

Herring spawning beds, seabird nesting areas, whale feeding grounds and salmon migration routes would all be tainted by drifting slicks of oil.

"The spills that occur on our coast are going ashore," Ms. O'Connor said. "They are going to hit precious places. They are going to hit culturally significant areas. They are going to hit places our communities depend on for sustenance, for cultural reasons, for economic reasons.

"That's what's going to happen on our coast. It's not going to get washed out into the great ocean."

She said a statistical analysis of international shipping figures shows that an oil spill of 10,000 barrels or greater will occur every 9.2 years on B.C.'s coast if tanker routes open up to serve even one of the six pipelines that have been proposed for ports in Kitimat and Prince Rupert.

"We would say that based on statistics of occurrences throughout the world in terms of tanker accidents, if we allow tankers onto our coast, oil spills are inevitable," she said.

"It's a matter of when the spill will happen and how large it will be. It's not a question of if a spill will happen."

Ms. O'Connor said the Living Oceans Society undertook the project because of the flurry of new proposals for oil tanker routes to serve pipelines linked to the continued expansion of Alberta's tar sands.

"Over the last two years there have been about six different projects come forward. And then there is a continued push by the Premier of B.C. to lift the moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration ... so we wanted to know the details of what would actually happen if there was a spill."

Ms. O'Connor said three of the four scenarios modelled were based on the Exxon Valdez accident, in which a tanker hit a reef off the Alaska coast in 1989, spilling 250,000 barrels. It was one of the worst environmental disasters in North American history.

"We thought the Exxon Valdez was a huge spill, and it was, but in the last few years it has moved from the 35th-largest spill to the 50th largest, so there have been lots of tanker spills way larger than the Exxon Valdez," she said.

In the scenarios, the oil tankers only spill a portion of their loads and the oil leaks out over several days, mimicking what happens in most shipping accidents.

Ms. O'Connor said that if oil spills occur there is little chance they will be contained by response teams, which could take several days to reach remote locations.

She added that even with modern technology, the industry definition of a successful cleanup is when 15 per cent of the oil is recovered.

"To us that's not a success. That's a disaster," she said.

Ms. O'Connor said Living Oceans wants to present the program to B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell and Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the hope of convincing them to ban oil tankers and offshore petroleum development.

Try the animations and read more at the Living Oceans Society website:www.livingoceans.org.