Nathan E Stewart

Bella Bella diesel spill: the aftermath

Kelly Brown was awoken at 4:30 a.m. on October 13, 2016, by the kind of phone call nobody ever wants to receive: an environmental catastrophe was unfolding a 20-minute boat ride up the coast from his home in the community of Bella Bella.

“I had to call this guy back because I wanted to make sure — because I’m half asleep — wanted to make sure that I heard him right, that there’s a tug that ran aground in our territory,” he recalls.

Brown is the director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management department, the branch of the Heiltsuk government in charge of the environmental stewardship of the First Nation’s traditional territory.

Two hours later he was on site with a team ready to respond.

“It was total chaos,” says hereditary chief Harvey Humchitt.

The Nathan E. Stewart, a 30-metre tugboat owned by the Kirby Corporation based in Houston, Texas, had failed to make a turn as it headed south. Instead, it ploughed into a reef. The barge it was pushing — a fuel barge with a capacity of 10,000 tons of fossil fuels, but which was mercifully empty — was caught on the reef while boats and ships of all sizes gathered to watch helplessly.

See the rest of the story here, or watch the video below.

https://www.facebook.com/thenarwhalca/videos/1262569037181987/

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Another year of keeping a close watch
Here at The Narwhal, we don’t use profit, awards or pageviews to measure success. The thing that matters most is real-world impact — evidence that our reporting influenced citizens to hold power to account and pushed policymakers to do better.

And in 2024, our stories were raised in legislatures across the country and cited by citizens in their petitions and letters to politicians.

In Alberta, our reporting revealed Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about the controversial renewables pause. In Manitoba, we proved that officials failed to formally inspect a leaky pipeline for years. And our investigations on a leaked recording of TC Energy executives were called “the most important Canadian political story of the year.”

We’d like to thank you for paying attention. And if you’re able to donate anything at all to help us keep doing this work in 2025 — which will bring a whole lot we can’t predict — thank you so very much.

Will you help us hold the powerful accountable in the year to come by giving what you can today?

Jimmy Thomson
Jimmy Thomson is an environmental journalist and the managing editor of Canada's National Observer. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The Walrus,...

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