Recipe for Disaster

Never mind that the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline passes through 731 miles of pristine habitat and will cross 1,000 streams and rivers on it’s way to Kitimat, never mind that Enbridge has had 610 oil leaks from 1999 to 2008, the one in Michigan was over 1 million U.S. gallons of toxic oil costing  $700 million to clean up, never mind that Canada has a cap on what energy companies have to pay for environmental disaster cleanups, that cap is  an obviously inadequate $40 million dollars and whatever the balance is to try to clean up the mess shall be picked up by the taxpayers of Canada. 

As if that is not enough my main concern is what happens to that toxic sludge once it gets to Kitimat. Up to two million barrels of toxic sludge will be pumped onto a supertanker that was never meant to sail into most ports in the world let alone 240 Km into the fourth most dangerous waterway in the world, these behemoths are up to 4 football fields long 68 meters wide and have a 70’ draft, fully loaded a full emergency stop takes 3 Km and 14 minutes, it takes 2 miles to turn one. 

There will be approximately 225 of these dirty bombs plying one of the most pristine marine habitats in the world a year. 

They claim they will use ocean going tugs to keep these  dirty bombs looking for a place to happen out of trouble but the reality is that two tugs could not even move a fully loaded super tanker in rough weather, I suspect that the cost of this measure would not last long anyway and would be soon forgotten because of the prohibitive costs involved. Never mind the thousands of other things that can go wrong in this harsh environment each loaded supertanker has enormous inertia once moving and is hard enough to control at the best of times without the human error, alcohol, drugs, heart attacks, incompetence, distraction,etc., navigation equipment failures, darkness, fog, Coriolis force, tides, currents, storms, mechanical failure, not to mention collisions with other vessels and natural obstacles that exist. 

A super tanker disaster is not a matter of if, it is most assuredly a forgone certainty, 

and just one disaster would surely wipe out any monetary gain and loss of precious habitat for the people of B.C and ultimately Canada. 

Wayne Clark