SIDNEY - It was a drizzly day that offered little incentive for a columnist to play hooky in the Gulf Islands, so instead I checked out the latest in a series of National Energy Board hearings on the GSX Project held here.
For the uninitiated, that's the Georgia Strait Crossing Project, a proposal by B.C. Hydro and Williams, an American pipeline giant, to ship natural gas from Sumas, Wash., to Vancouver Island.
But the $260-million scheme has been dogged by controversy since an application was filed with the NEB a year ago.
GSX involves laying pipe about twice the diameter of a basketball across 44 kilometres of seabed between the mainland and Vancouver Island.
Critics say that the route violates a marine ecological reserve, crosses a seismically active zone that has produced nine major earthquakes over the past 130 years and also passes beneath B.C. ferry routes. Some complain that burning the gas will eventually double the volume of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere by B.C. Hydro.
Alarmed myself recently at the rapid melting of another Antarctic ice shelf and recalling my own harrowing day in an Edmonton newsroom in 1976 when a pipeline less than half the diameter of the one proposed for Georgia Strait ruptured, spewed a pool of boiling propane into the residential suburb of Mill Woods and forced the instant evacuation of 19,000 people, I have some idea of why there might be concerns.
I mean, it's not as though the pipeline industry has a spotless record.
Just last February, Marlene Robinson -- mother of one of the kids killed when a pipeline burst in Bellingham in 1999 -- was reminding a committee of the U.S. Congress of that fact.
Robinson drew attention to U.S. General Accounting Office records which showed more than four serious American pipeline accidents every week from 1989 through 1998. Those accidents killed 300 people, injured more than 1,500 and caused $850 million US in property damage.
Furthermore, she said, the number of such accidents was increasing by about four per cent per year. When I followed up her assertion, the actual news accounts made for hair-raising reading -- eight-storey retirement homes filling with natural gas and blowing up, entire rivers bursting into flame, people being cooked alive by the score.
So maybe the GSX critics do have something worth discussing when they fret about greenhouse gas emissions and remind us that experts from the Pacific Geoscience Centre just a few kilometres from Sidney confirm there is a lot of potentially hazardous seismic activity in the Georgia Basin.
A major research project was launched in 1997 to map the complicated fault pattern in Georgia Strait and Puget Sound. Hundreds of small crustal earthquakes occur in the region each year.
Since the beginning of March, for example, there have already been five small earthquakes in the south Georgia Basin.
Most of these tremors are inconsequential, but whoppers like the magnitude 6.8 quake that did more than $1 billion US damage to Seattle in 2001 are far more frequent than most of us like to think.
Over the last 85 years, there have actually been four earthquakes in the south Georgia Basin bigger than last year's temblor in Seattle and similar in magnitude to the one that flattened Kobe, Japan, in 1995.
Does this mean pipeline engineers can't design a pipe capable of safely withstanding this kind of seismic activity? No. Does it mean the public has a duty to scrutinize any such plans from every possible perspective? You bet.
Which is why I stuck around to witness some of the exchanges at what the National Energy Board calls "Joint Panel Hearings for GSX Pipeline, Argument in Motion."
There was an argument of sorts going on when I nabbed a seat at the back.
But it had a lot more in common with listening to hippos wade through lukewarm porridge than hearing witty Shakespearian repartee in a lively legal fencing match.
The woman sitting next to me kept falling asleep. I soon discovered why.
The lawyers argued in the most ponderous terms about whether the NEB panel had any power to consider potential environmental effects arising from the combustion of natural gas.
A lawyer for the Alberta government said it didn't and argued that assessing environmental effects would be a unwarranted intrusion into provincial jurisdiction. Besides, she said, greenhouse gases are a global problem and the natural gas was going to be burned whether on Vancouver Island or in California -- implying we might as well have the pollution here as elsewhere.
British Columbia's lawyer also urged that the panel should not require any assessment of the environmental impact of greenhouse gas emissions.
A lawyer for the pipeline company argued that the panel had no power to consider greenhouse gases and that, anyway, his client was just the carrier and the pipeline had nothing to do with the gas or what happened to it after it came out of the pipe.
A panel member countered that B.C. Hydro would own 50 per cent of the pipeline company and 50 per cent of the plant that would burn the natural gas to make electricity and that one of its wholly owned subsidiaries would sell the electricity. The company lawyer deftly parried with the argument that the gas would be burned at gas burning facilities and would not be burned by the pipeline.
Then, at the end of the day came James Campbell, ordinary citizen.
Are greenhouse gas emissions merely a "global" problem? Campbell drew the panel's attention to a letter from Gabriola Island, right across from where one of the gas turbines is to be located.
The writer cited an American Journal of Medicine research paper showing that any increase in air pollution has a direct, linear relationship to increases in respiratory disorders, heart disease and cancer.
"The (U.S.) Environmental Protection Agency states there is no known safe level," she wrote.
Campbell cited figures from B.C. Hydro, which he said showed it would be far cheaper simply to replace aging submarine cables to Vancouver Island. Over 30 years, he said, generating electricity from natural gas would cost the taxpayers and consumers $7.7 billion more than using electricity generated from the Peace and Columbia River systems.
In other words, if Campbell is right, the GSX would be a financial blunder more than 10 times worse than former New Democratic premier Glen Clark's fast ferry fiasco. Interesting that we had to wait for a member of the public to raise that possibility.
shume@islandnet.com
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