After the Jan. 11 train derailment and coal spill, local streamkeepers posed the question: Will there be Fisheries Act charges?
I’ve been trying since then to get a reply, and the short answer is we still don’t know.
After a breached beaver dam and heavy rains washed out CN's tracks in Burnaby, seven cars derailed and three tipped over. Roughly 83 cubic metres of coal were dumped into Silver Creek, which runs into Burnaby Lake. Some of the finer stuff made is downstream past the Cariboo Dam, but a CN-hired company was able to recover most of it, we’re told.
According to the federal Fisheries Act, it's illegal to deposit a "deleterious" substance into water frequented by fish, and the area where the spill happened was labelled as sensitive habitat for fish and wildlife, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada.
Early in the game we were told Environment Canada is monitoring the situation to determine if there are any violations of federal environmental legislation, including the pollution provisions of the Fisheries Act.
As of this morning, that’s still the case.
Environment Canada hasn’t made any decision yet, and until they do, they are not releasing any information. Trust me, I’ve tried everything: playing nice and arm-twisting, and they are not talking until a decision is made.
However, we do know that they don’t consider coal a deleterious (ie: harmful) substance, when in solid form. (Gas and liquid coal might be another story.) So the chances of Fisheries Act charges are slim if I had to hazard a guess. Whether there will be any regulatory enforcement remains to be seen, and given that this whole thing was an accident, caused by busy beavers building a dam too close to the tracks, I doubt there will be any repercussions from the federal government.
