The Dominion - Erin Empey

Sinking Ships

dawn — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:39:32 +0000

Shipwrecks, shellfish and the future of the BC coast

HARTLEY BAY, BC—The two ex-lovers who were at the helm of the BC Ferries ship Queen of the North during a routine overnight sailing from Prince Rupert to Port Hardy six years ago probably didn't expect their first reunion after a two-week separation to end the way it did. Years later, despite a lengthy investigation into what happened that night (with which the ex-lovers refused to co-operate), only the bridge crew on staff know the specific details of the human error that caused a 700-passenger ferry to collide with Gil Island and sink in the early hours of March 22, 2006.

Soon the jagged rocks and narrow channels that consumed the ferry may be an obstacle course for much larger ships, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

If the Northern Gateway pipeline proposal is accepted, tankers will cross the ferry route at Wright Sound, passing the sunken ship as they start up Douglas Channel.

The tankers would carry hundreds of millions of litres of bitumen from Kitimat to China, making the 250,000 litres of diesel on the Queen of the North seem paltry by comparison.

Each tanker is three times the length of the ferry, requiring two kilometres to stop completely. There is far less room for human or technical error. With growing opposition to the gas and oil pipelines proposed to cross BC, a closer look at the Queen of the North incident sheds new light on the dangers of tanker traffic on the wild, rocky coast.

The passengers and crew stranded in the dark, isolated sound on that fateful March night in 2006 were fortunate to be in Gitga’at Nation Territory.

Upon hearing the radioed distress signals, nearly all of the 200 Gitga’at residents of the nearby Hartley Bay leapt out of bed, mobilized every boat in the village and prepared the community centre to accommodate 99 exhausted and traumatized survivors. Their life-saving efforts came well in advance of the arrival of the Coast Guard. Even with this effort, two of the passengers aboard the Queen of the North, Shirley Rosette and Gerald Foisy, were never found and are presumed dead.

When it sank, the Queen of the North brought hundreds of thousands of litres of diesel, oil and hydraulic fluid down with it. First responders on the scene that night reported that the entire surface of Wright Sound was covered in a film of diesel.

Hartley Bay residents as far as 11 kilometres away reported that they could smell the accident from their homes. The 2007 Queen of the North Monitoring Summary Review, an environmental report commissioned by BC Ferries, found that following the sinking, patches of diesel dotted several hundred square kilometres of ocean surface and may have contacted 100 kilometres of shoreline.

Six years later, community members from Hartley Bay are still dealing with the impacts of the sinking. The ship remains on the ocean floor. Even today, they say, diesel patches are visible when the weather is calm.

“If the Queen of the North had sunk anywhere near Vancouver or Victoria, it would still not be sitting at the bottom of the ocean, leaking contaminants,” said Cameron Hill, a Hartley Bay Band Council member. “There’s no way that would have happened anywhere else. But it’s happening right outside Hartley Bay.”

Hill claims that two days after the sinking, former BC Premier Gordon Campbell and former BC Ferries CEO David Hahn promised the ship would be raised. “At the very least, [they said] they will take out all of the contaminants,” said Hill. “The technology is there to do that. That never happened either. And still to this day it leaks.”

Following analysis from the Canadian Coast Guard and London Offshore Consultants, BC Ferries determined that it was not worth raising the wreck or attempting to remove the diesel. Nobody knows for certain whether all of the diesel was dispersed in the incident, or if some is still trapped in the hull. The Queen of the North remains 430 metres under the ocean.

Removing the diesel floating on the ocean surface also proved to be an insurmountable task.

Diesel is a very light fuel that spreads to less than one millimetre of depth. Without a very calm surface it is difficult to extract. “There was not a heck of a lot that you could do,” said Ernie Hill, one of three Hereditary Chiefs of the Gitga’at. “They had booms out there, but all they could do was redirect it. I think somebody said they collected, maybe ten gallons or something, of actual diesel fuel. But the rest went to the beaches.”

Western Canada Marine Response Corporation, the company contracted by BC Ferries for the cleanup, did not respond to interview requests before this article went to press.

Ernie Hill and others think the diesel is already taking a toll on marine life.

“Unfortunately there were really big tides,” said Hill. “Our major clam beds were just totally below it. We looked at the clams the following year and they were just not good. You know, dark inside and not very much of it. And it drifts up to the high water mark and it affected a lot of our plants there too.”

BC Ferries, a private corporation contracted and legislated by the BC government, promised the region would be restored to a pristine condition and that it would fund a yearly contribution to the Hartley Bay Band to pay for monitoring and testing of marine life in the area. The monitoring included visually inspecting the wreck area to check for leaking fuel as well as sending shellfish to a lab to check for contamination.

BC Ferries paid for monitoring until March 2011, when the company decided it was no longer effective at detecting pollution. The decision to axe the monitoring program occurred the same year that BC Ferries was facing a $20 million budget shortfall, following years of controversy surrounding high executive compensation. The company considers the monitoring unreliable at detecting spills because of factors such as weather conditions, timing of the upwelling, underwater currents and limited time spent on the water.

“The result of this monitoring disclosed extremely minor leakage from the wreck of approximately half a litre of fuel per day or less, which spread and dissipated quickly on the surface without any identified environmental impact,” wrote Deborah Marshall, Executive Director of Public Affairs for BC Ferries, in an email to The Dominion. “Upwelling monitoring did not provide any useful data other than to establish that, over the five-year period, the wreck appeared to be very stable with decreased residual leakage,” she wrote.

The Queen of the North Monitoring Summary Review suggests that the effects of the Queen of the North were short lived. “Local residents have indicated that their food resources are still contaminated, but the science indicates that resources closest to the wreck site were ‘recovered’ by June of 2006 and contaminant levels reached the same level as sites that had not been affected by the spill,” wrote John Harper, who coordinated the monitoring program for BC Ferries, in an email to The Dominion.

Hartley Bay residents, believing there are lingering impacts from the vessel, are now paying for their own visual monitoring. Many residents still won’t eat from certain shellfish beds.

Health Canada has done shellfish testing since BC Ferries ceased doing it, although residents are uncertain how long that will continue. Even if the toxins are at low levels now, without daily monitoring, residents have no way of knowing if an underwater "burp" has unleashed a fresh batch of diesel onto the clam beds.

Ernie Hill takes this contamination very seriously. His peoples’ traditional harvesting grounds hold centuries of cultural significance, and are also a major food source. Their territory is remote; the nearest grocery store is in Prince Rupert, a four-hour ferry ride away. Since goods shipped to the region are expensive, access to local seafood is a matter of survival.

“Any oil spill, anywhere in our territory, that’s the end for us,” said Hill. “Our people would cease to exist, really. We’ll have to move out.”

The Queen of the North isn’t the only abandoned shipwreck in Gitga’at Territory. In 2003, the Coast Guard noticed a mysterious crude oil slick in Grenville Channel that polluted five kilometres of shoreline.

Shortly after the discovery, an underwater robot determined it was the Brigadier General MG Zalinksi, a long-forgotten US armament ship that sank in 1946, approximately 30 kilometres northwest of the ferry’s shipwreck. The Canadian government sent divers down to plug the corroded rivet holes. The quick fix was repeated this spring when more bunker oil was discovered to be leaking.

Although the Zalinski sits under only 27 metres of water, a long-term solution is complicated by the fact that the ship contains at least a dozen 500-pound aerial bombs. The United States government has absolved itself of any responsibility, and the Canadian government has been deliberating on a solution for years.

For now, other ships have simply been warned not to anchor near the site.

The Gitga’at are left hoping for a solution before the 93-year-old ship rusts away, releasing whatever remains of the 700 tonnes of bunker C fuel the ship was carrying. Bunker C is a much denser and more persistent toxin than the diesel released by the ferry. Its consistency and effects are more like the crude that was carried by the Exxon Valdez tanker that crashed in Alaska in 1989.

As unhappy as the Gitga’at are about the abandonment of either shipwreck in their territory, they know they still aren’t dealing with the worst-case scenario.

“The Queen of the North spilled thousands of litres of diesel that impacted our territory,” said Cameron Hill. “In the overall scheme of oil spills, diesel is a pretty light material compared to the crude that’s going to be in these tankers.”

Members of Indigenous communities from Alaska have visited Hartley Bay to share their experiences of the Exxon Valdez. One such community was so badly hit that the people had to be permanently relocated. “Everybody involved knew that there was no way that their territory was ever going to rebound for these people,” said Hill. “They moved them off of every bit of passed-down knowledge that they had ever known about the territory that they were in.”

If industry gets its way, Northern Gateway tankers will carry diluted bitumen, which is much more expensive and difficult to clean up than crude oil. Unlike diesel, bitumen does not evaporate, and unlike diesel or crude, it doesn’t really float. Once it is spilled in water, it separates into a poisonous gas condensate and a dense sticky resin that is too heavy to be caught by surface skimmers. It coats the surrounding wilderness with a persistent toxic sludge.

According to a Canadian Press report, the head of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans' Centre for Offshore Oil, Gas and Energy Research, Dr. Kenneth Lee, believes that Enbridge has done insufficient research on the differences between crude oil and bitumen spills.

While the Enbridge bitumen pipeline is heavily contested, construction has already begun to accommodate tankers carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG). Hartley Bay residents are more or less resigned to the LNG tankers, which are slightly smaller than the bitumen tankers and carry different risks. An LNG spill would not coat sea life in a heavy toxic slick, but it can become flammable as it evaporates.

“We’ve been trained by Burrard Clean, that’s an oil cleanup company,” said Marven Robinson, a Hartley Bay Band Council member and part of the marine guardianship program. “They told us, ‘See what you guys did the night the ferries sank? Don’t do it with any of those ships going up to Kitimat.‘ The guy said they’re being paid, for dangerous pay. They said ‘Don’t you guys ever go out to one of these boats. If it’s condensate, don’t go out at all. If anything you might have to move all of the people in the community.’ We said ‘Why?’ and he said ‘Well the condensate is under pressure. And it’s safe while it’s under pressure. But as soon as you take that pressure away it starts to evaporate.’ They said ‘If you guys go to one of these accidents your outboard motors will ignite the condensate.‘”

Unlike BC Ferries, which is controlled by the province, Northern Gateway tankers will be owned by a variety of foreign entities who would be liable for costs of cleanup in the eventuality of an ocean spill. Enbridge is promising to extend its spill response plan to the ocean, though it isn't legally responsible for the oil once it has left the pipeline. Spill costs that exceed $1.3 billion will be on Canadian taxpayers. The 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker accident resulted in $3.5 billion in cleanup costs and $5 billion in legal and financial settlements.

The historical precedents set by past wrecks have the Gitga’at apprehensive about the future of their territory. Once a ship goes down, it appears it does not come back up. Once a contaminant is in the water, it can’t easily be removed. Long-forgotten wrecks can come back to haunt the living. Parties liable for cleanup, if they accept accountability at all, can unilaterally decide when the work is done. Experienced crews on established routes with sophisticated technology remain vulnerable to human error.

Erin Empey is a Vancouver based writer.

Hartley Bay

Map of routes of Queen of the North & proposed Northern Gateway

Sharing Wheels

Moira Peters — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 05:43:38 +0000

Vancouver car sharing co-op’s success spurs private competition

VANCOUVER—I fired up my 1994 Volkswagen Golf. After two weeks of sitting idle, the decrepit car filled my East Vancouver cul-de-sac with thick blue exhaust. At the time—last year—I lived on East 10th Avenue, which is practically a highway for cyclists. I hung my head in shame as I pulled away and some poor biker disappeared, hacking in the toxic plume.

It was time for that horrible car to go.

In British Columbia you can trade in your crappy car for bus passes, bike discounts or a car sharing membership. This is how I discovered the Co-operative Auto Network (CAN). Formed in Vancouver in 1996 as part of a university project, the network has since expanded from a two-car, 16-member operation to one with 240 cars and more than 7,000 members. The network has also seen the rise of Zipcar, a competing car sharing organization that operates under a traditional business model.

Tanya Paz, client relations and development director of CAN, sees a couple of advantages of running car sharing as a co-op instead of as a for-profit enterprise. Besides the availability of seed funding from local credit unions, “people feel like they have more of a sense of ownership,” which motivates members to respect the cars, according to Paz.

In the beginning, 28-year-old Tracey Axelson, CAN’s founder, struggled to have her vision taken seriously—by insurance companies, the city and financiers—as she lacked business experience. . Car sharing organizations already existed in Germany, Switzerland and Montreal, but Paz recalls critics telling the organizers of the fledgling network that on “the West Coast, people will never give up their cars.”

Car sharing works best, according to Paz, in areas where there is a combination of easy, pleasant walking, safe cycling and frequent transit. The costs are worthwhile if somebody doesn’t need to drive every day and only takes short trips. For out-of-town trips, the per-kilometre rate charged by the co-op is often more expensive than renting.

“The car co-op program has taught me that I probably need a car in the future,” said Brandy Trudeau, a former Zipcar member and current CAN member, “because of my mobility issues and the fact that there isn’t a car right outside my door.” Trudeau has arthritis and found Zipcars were not easily accessible in her neighborhood. She is content with her CAN membership for now. “I actually like being able to try different cars,” she said. “The variety of vehicles is kind of fun.”

Currently, CAN’s roaming agreements with other car sharing organizations allow members access to cars in Victoria, San Francisco and Halifax, and Paz says CAN is working on expanding to other cities.

CAN has consulted for other car sharing start-ups around the world, but staff did not expect a private car sharing organization they consulted for to become competition. Zipcar launched about 10 years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has spread to 94 American cities as well as to London, Toronto and Vancouver. Zipcar now has more than 400,000 members.

“Of course we never expected them to go to Toronto or come here,” said Paz. “But I would say that they made us grow smarter, and the amount of money that they spend on advertising has really brought a lot of members to us.”

CAN was already established in Vancouver when Zipcar arrived, so Zipcar employed a different growth strategy in the West Coast city. Paz is critical. “They don’t grow in a very sustainable manner and some of their business decisions don’t make much sense to me,” she said. Zipcar launched its Vancouver operation in 2007 with 100 cars and the expectation of expansion, but wound up culling the fleet to 80.

Whether co-operative or private, car sharing networks can boast that they help reduce carbon emissions—over three quarters of a ton per household per year, according to a June, 2010 study by the Mineta Institute at the San Jose State University.

The study acknowledges that at an individual level, emissions can increase. “There are times when it’s really nice to have a car and previously I would just suck it up or take a cab,” said Trudeau. “Now I find that instead I’m booking a car for a day and going and doing all the things I want to do. I find that I’m spending a little bit more money.”

Running a co-operative can be a challenge because it is subject to the whims of its ever-changing democratically elected board of volunteers, said Paz. Members do not necessarily have business experience. The board might request that staff use cheques instead of credit cards for business expenses, for example. “The reality of doing business today is that [using cheques] is quite a delay,” said Paz. “There are times that I’m sure the founder thinks, ‘Why didn’t I just own this myself?'”

Paz is passionate about the co-operative business model because it fosters a co-operative economy as a whole.

“It’s basically a different way of doing business, of thinking about things,” said Paz. “[Co-ops] have the heart of an NGO and the mind of a business. So you’re working for the best interests of the members, but also for the benefit of your society around you as a whole.”

Erin Empey is a Vancouver-based writer.

Car share

Propagandhi Scores Against War

Moira Peters — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:33:19 +0000

Torture, Terror, and Don Cherry face the music in the band's sixth release

Propagandhi, Winnipeg’s “progressive thrash” heroes, have just released a new album. Supporting Caste is twelve and a half songs of political passion and metal-tinged post-punk. Singer Chris Hannah discusses the issues inspiring their sixth full-length album.

Erin Empey: Do you think that Propagandhi has evolved since the release of Potemkin City Limits? What’s new with Supporting Caste?

Chris Hannah: I'd like to think so! At the very least, we added The Beave on second guitar to the line-up, so that's new, and in my opinion has added a lot more depth, dimension and atmosphere to our customary sonic pummelings.

Also, Jord has more gray hair on this record. I’m not sure if that comes through on the recording though.

Since you guys decided to fold your record label last year, how has working with Smallman been compared to G7 Welcoming Committee?

Well, considering we're in a time where the racket of selling recordings to people has been essentially eviscerated, it's been pretty good! We've known them for years, they understand where we're coming from and they live within choking distance. These are important factors.

G7 operated using Participatory Economics (parecon), where business decisions were made democratically and profits were shared equally among members. Based on your experience, do you think it could be applied on a larger scale?

After a decade of experience in a parecon-inspired enterprise that was subject to all the human frailties and palace intrigues that every single gathering of more than two people throughout history has always endured, I still can't come up with any good reason why people shouldn't endeavor to embrace parecon's core values of solidarity, equity, diversity and self-management in their workplaces. It makes sense and it is right.

The track “Human(e) Meat” opens with a howling Sandor Katz about to be cannibalized. Who is Katz and why do you want to eat him?

Sandor Katz is someone who talks and writes about food. He has a book called "the Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved" that is actually worth reading until you hit the absurd and utterly embarrassing chapter where he tries to rationalize torturing, maiming, killing and mutilating sentient animals for his personal enjoyment. It is the type of embarrassing new-age hippy nonsense that sets serious debate about food politics and human ethics back a decade every time it rears its hippy head.

We simply used his logic, step by step, and daydreamed me rationalizing torturing, maiming, killing and mutilating him for my personal enjoyment. Which is of course also absurd, which was the point of the illustration.

Apparently he has no sense of humour (or of his own irony for that matter) and is very upset about it. Poor persecuted meat eaters! Will they never be free from the tyrannical oppression of vegetarians?

In “Dear Coaches Corner” you lament Don Cherry using his platform to promote militarism. Do you think that there are ugly politics in hockey culture beyond Don Cherry's routines?

For sure. Cherry is just the emptiest and hence, the loudest barrel. The culture of professional hockey is essentially a propaganda wing of the western elite and their geo-political objectives. Why else would Jim Balsillie, head cocknose of the company that makes the Blackberry, appear on Hockey Night in Canada thanking Canadian troops in Afghanistan for "defending our lifestyle?" Wait, I thought it was about liberating Afghan women? Whoops!

During the pre-release of Supporting Caste, proceeds from downloads went to Partners in Health, Sea Shepherd Society and Peta2. Why are these groups important to you?

Partners in Health provides a preferential option for the poor in health care. At its root, their mission is both medical and moral. It is based on solidarity, rather than charity alone. When their patients are ill and have no access to care, their team of health professionals, scholars, and activists will do whatever it takes to make them well – just as one would do if a member of one's own family were ill. They stand with their patients, some of the poorest and sickest victims of poverty and violence, in their struggle for equity and social justice.

People for the ethical treatment of animals is probably best known as the most frequently criticized and denounced activist organization on the planet. Some of the criticisms are legitimate, like those that lament campaigns that play on and foster or perpetuate sexist stereotypes in the service of drawing attention to the mundane terrors visited upon animals in human societies. Still, Peta2 (the youth wing of its parent organization) is currently the most effective potential gateway drug to an abolitionist animal liberation perspective that is not merely anti-animal exploitation, but anti-capitalist, anti-sexist and connects human affairs with non-human animal affairs.

Less than one percent of the planet's living creatures live on land, so you'll have to excuse Captain Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society for his bluntness when declaring the Sea Shepherds Society's "single-mindedness" for defending the oceans from human encroachment and exploitation. We humans constitute less than 0.1% of life on earth and act like we are entitled to the rest of it. Humans continue to terrorize and destroy the largest-brained sentient mammals in the history of earth and enlist the services of PR firms to cloak the brutality in vestments of scientific research. The Sea Shepherd intends to stop such stupidity.

Do you ever feel awkward about speaking on behalf of groups you are not a part of, such as Aboriginals, refugees or women? With an influential band, is there a danger of overshadowing the voices of those you are trying to help?

Not if you're a good listener. My obligation as I see it is to take the information that marginalized groups have articulated to me about the realities they face in a fucked up system and relay it to my people in a way that has resonance. And what can I say? My people happen to be largely white guys in NHL starter caps. Hey, we need information too, eh!

When are you playing Vancouver?

I refuse to answer such a politically-loaded question!

Erin Empey is a Vancouver based journalist.

propaghandi