As I’m sure you know by now, I never believed what Cons like James Moore and Greg Rickford had to say about that oil spill in Vancouver’s English Bay.
Especially when they and the Harper Coast Guard said that only about 3,000 litres of toxic bunker had leaked out of that freighter, and that all but six litres had been recovered.
And sure enough it turns out that estimate was too CONservative.
Officials in charge of cleaning up a bunker fuel spill in Vancouver’s English Bay now say the estimate of what leaked from a grain carrier was a conservative figure.
Owen Rusticus with Environment Canada says the 2,700-litre spill estimate wasn’t based on gauges, but was gathered using sensors on the thickness of the oil in combination with the size of the spill on the water.
Nor do I believe this either.
Coast Guard commissioner Jody Thomas says 80 per cent of that estimated spill had been cleaned up by the first day and what’s left is “a negligible amount.”
Not when they don’t yet know how much oil is under the water. Not when my friends in Vancouver tell me the gooey black stuff can be found coating rocks all over the shore line.
As this video clearly demonstrates . . .
And not when most sane people in BC know that what happened was just a preview of the spill from hell.
Vancouver just got a small whiff of what a sevenfold increase in tanker traffic could mean for a place aspiring to be the world’s greenest city.
And that while a bunker fuel spill is bad, a bitumen spill would be catastrophic.
A major difference is that bunker fuel floats, and bitumen typically doesn’t. A relatively small spill of diluted bitumen from an Enbridge pipeline into the Kalamazoo River in 2010 proved to be one of the most expensive inland clean up efforts in American history.
Why? Because conventional recovery equipment designed for floating oil proved useless in recovering the thick bitumen that quickly sank once the toxic “diluent” began off-gassing in surrounding area.
And the good news is they will hold this against the Cons in the next election.
It will be a factor in many of what are, or were expected to be ,close races in the Lower Mainland.
And in a close election.
It will help sink them . . .
