SFU students on Burnaby Mountain will go through a mock tank farm disaster next summer, the NOW has learned.
Mark LaLonde, the university’s chief safety officer, said his department has been working on a mass evacuation and shelter-in-place plan for the last few months. The goal is to have it finished by this fall, with a “large exercise on campus” scheduled for June 2018.
“Kinder Morgan, one of their NEB conditions is that they work with us on that,” said LaLonde. “We’ll be working with our community partners – fire, police, ambulance. ... We’re going to simulate an event at the tank farm, and what we’ll do is shelter in place and a partial simulated evacuation.”
Right now, SFU has what’s called a “comprehensive emergency plan,” which gets updated periodically (the last update was done November 2016). The plan takes “an all-hazards approach to any number of things that could happen,” according to LaLonde.
“It’s not as robust as we would have liked, and that’s why we’re working on a new plan. The expansion of the tank farm poses new challenges,” he said.
The chief safety officer stressed that any emergency plan has to be flexible in order to deal with factors such as weather and time of day.
On March 1, Trans Mountain filed an updated risk assessment for its Burnaby terminal, which will see an additional 14 new tanks, bringing the total to 26.
The report concluded the fire risk, without any mitigating measures in place, is “extremely low” and meets the criteria set out by the Major Industrial Accidents Council of Canada.
Jamie Kereliuk, Trans Mountain’s director of emergency management, told the NOW he’s confident the facility is very safe, and that the company’s operation record speaks for itself.
“In over 60 years, we haven’t had any storage tank fires at the terminal,” he said in March.
But LaLonde said, despite the low-risk classification, the proposed tank farm expansion still poses a threat.
“They’re looking at tanks within 150 metres of the intersection that is our only egress point. The simple placement of that there alone and then you compound that with what’s in the tanks.
“On a busy day, we’ll have 25,000 people in our university footprint. It’s probably safe to say 1,000 of those (people) would have mobility challenges, whether they’re older or they’re children, ... people who require wheelchairs or assistance,” he said.
Asked whether the idea of building a second road down the mountain has been seriously discussed, LaLonde said there’s been a “live discussion” around building a gondola.
“It strikes me that would be simpler than building another road. Where would the other road go?” he asked. “My understanding of it from what I’ve read is (the gondola) would transport up to 4,000 people an hour, a roughly six-minute trip down to Production Way.”
