This is in response to Mark Forsyth’s CBC Almanac radio interview with Colin Kinsley of Northern Gateway Alliance on June 2.

Mr. Kinsley is trying to make the public feel warm and fuzzy by promising tethered tugboats and double-hulled tankers for the Northern Gateway Project. The project calls for a twinned pipeline, which would carry diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to Kitimat. Super tankers loaded in Kitimat would carry the product to refineries in Asia and the U.S.

Tethered tugboat escorts come with extremely high operating costs. Three major west coast oil ports have tried to shed this essential safety requirement. San Francisco has no tethered escorts, and Puget Sound tried to reduce from one tethered tug to one on standby only. The Alaska port of Valdez tried to reduce from two tugs to one only, but a bill in the Alaska State Congress stepped in to retain the coverage. At 240 kilometres, the confined channel area from Kitimat to the Browning entrance is 100 kilometres longer and much more challenging than the Valdez course. It would not be surprising if Enbridge would soon lobby for similar cuts to increase their corporate profits.

In the last three years, two of the 10 tugboat assist vessels stationed in Valdez have themselves run aground on the rocks. Ten years earlier, one of these was also involved in a collision with another escort vessel while accompanying a laden oil tanker out of Prince William Sound.

Big ships are notorious for engine failures and loss of steering. The port of Los Angeles recently reported these problems in one per cent of their commercial vessels. The proposed Enbridge traffic would amount to 230 product tankers a year to Kitimat. At that rate, we can expect up to three crippled tankers somewhere in the narrow approaches to the port every year of operation.

Double hulls will supposedly make the Enbridge proposal trouble-free. The Exxon Valdez was first holed in a region of the ship which had a double hull, but the ship continued to founder on the reef until the single hulled cargo tanks were torn apart. A complete double hull would have made little difference to the end result.

During a storm off Korea in 2007, a single hulled oil tanker was pierced by a floating crane. At just one tenth the size of the Exxon Valdez, the spill kept fifty thousand contractors and volunteers busy for one million man-days to clean the oil-soaked, sandy resort beaches. Just try getting that much help to the complex, isolated, rocky fjords of B.C’s north coast. A similar collision in Texas this year pierced the inner hull of a double-hulled tanker at the water line - the worst possible location. Although only half as large as the Korean oil spill, and with easy access for the clean-up crews, the event showed that double hulls are no guarantee.

It doesn’t matter; double-hulled tankers or not, tugboat escorts or not, with human error and machinery failure, we are guaranteed a major oil spill if Enbridge Northern Gateway is approved. It is irresponsible verging on criminal to subject the Great Bear Rainforest to corporate greed that ensures the energy security of China.

Say no to Enbridge.

Dave Shannon

Terrace