There will be some citizens of Burnaby who may balk at the news that the city has spent at least $154,000 of taxpayer money fighting the proposed Trans Mountain expansion project.
But we’re not among them. The twinning of the pipeline in Burnaby and the expansion of the Westridge Terminal to support up to a projected 34 oil tankers a month from the present five a month demanded action by the city. In fact, the city would have been negligent in its duty to try and protect its citizens and the local environment if it hadn’t challenged the expansion.
While Kinder Morgan, of course, says the safety risk is small, the Concerned Professional Engineers group says Kinder Morgan’s risk assessments have not taken into consideration the true risk of potential collisions with any of the bridges tankers have to navigate to leave the harbour.
The City of Vancouver tabled a report to the National Energy Board showing the risk of a marine oil spill in the 50-year life of the project is between 16 and 67 per cent. That’s unacceptable.
And let us be clear – a spill from an oil tanker with 680,000 barrels of oil will be cataclysmic. The Exxon Valdez tanker crash of 1989 spilled about 260,000 barrels of crude oil. It eventually covered 1,300 miles of coastline and killed hundreds of thousands of birds, animals and sea life. The area has never recovered, and thousands of gallons of oil can still be found on local beaches.
In Burnaby, tankers will be filled with bitumen, which sinks to the bottom – making it virtually impossible to recover. Aside from the potential for a tanker crash, there is the obvious problem of situating an oil terminal in an earthquake zone and an urban area.
This is certainly like playing Russian roulette with nature.
The Burnaby Board of Trade even delivered a special report to members that panned the project.
Given the potential economic benefits, one might think a board of trade’s support would be a no-brainer. But its conclusion was that the pros did not outnumber the cons. Between seismic risks and the fact that Burnaby is now a much more dense urban area, the BOT found that the project is simply not worth it.
If Burnaby’s $154,000 even slowed this project down a bit, it was money well spent.
