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I’ll admit to sharing some British Columbians’ concerns about shipping oil from Alberta’s oilsands to Asia using tankers leaving from a port on that province’s north-central coast. The Pacific coast is a special place, with salmon, eagles and grizzlies. Befouling it with crude oil from a tanker spill would be a horrible ecological tragedy.
Still, it should be possible to build a port at Kitimat and run tankers in and out of the Douglas Channel without incident. The key is not merely devising the right rules for tanker operation, but also maintaining vigilant enforcement for as long as ships filled with oil navigate through the sensitive waterway.
The problem with the 1989 Exxon Valdez grounding was not that Alaska had too few safety regulations at the time, but rather that the company had become lax in following them and government enforcers had stopped monitoring company compliance.
If I lived along the B.C. coast, I would not worry about a major spill in the first five or 10 years, but rather 15 or 20 years out. When everyone involved is lulled into indifference and begins to assume they no longer need to adhere to the letter of the safety regulations, that’s when residents should be concerned. When a spotless record convinces politicians they can cut back monitoring and enforcement budgets, that is when the risk of a disaster is greatest.
Dr. Philip John, a marine engineering expert, points out in a new study released by Ottawa’s Macdonald-Laurier Institute this week that Canada is already respected as a world-leader in “managing oil tanker traffic safely in ecologically sensitive waterways.” The number of oils spills in Canadian waters has declined dramatically over the last 40 years — as it has worldwide.
Although maritime oil traffic has almost doubled over the past four decades, only 3.5% of the oil spilled from ships during that period was spilled in the 2000s. Most of the spillage occurred in the 1980s. Spills in Canada’s waters went “from a high of 18 in the 1980s to six during the 1990s, to zero in the 2000s.” According to Dr. John, “only the Netherlands and Sweden can match Canada’s perfect record in the last decade.” This achievement he attributes to improvements in tanker construction (especially double hulls), improved regulatory standards “and a keen sense of awareness, safety and environmental consciousness.”
Still, all it takes is one Valdez.
For the rest of this article, please go to the National Post website: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/03/15/lorne-gunter-unfounded-fears-of-a-canadian-exxon-valdez-on-the-west-coast/