The Canadian Press has been strangely silent about the last Trans-Alaska pipeline spill Jan. 8, which cut the Prudhoe Bay oil production by 95 per cent and raised the price oil to more than $90 a barrel.
The Trans-Alaska pipeline is owned by Alyeska, a consortium of oil companies with BP as the majority shareholder. While Alyeska prides itself of a 98.57 per cent reliability rate on its website, what this actually means is a cascade of significant spills and leaks topped by the catastrophic August 2006 spill of 260,000 gallons.
It was due to corrosion and happened shortly after their chief executive Bob Malone had stated, at a press conference that the corrosion detection and control program in the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline system (TAPS) is "world class."
Fines for this massive spill were a mere $20 million. If this was not enough, another mishap happened in May 2010, due to a power outage of both the regular power supply and its back-up system.
Now in January, another leak, likely due to corrosion, which has been underlying all the spills and leaks, as well as cost saving measures like not manning pump stations and moving engineering staff to cities away from the field.
Does all of this not sound familiar with Enbridge making all the predictable and cheap promises of world-class technology for their proposed pipeline?
Do we need more Alaska, or Gulf disasters to realize that the risks are huge and irreversible?
Josette Wier
Smithers
