At an estimated 2,700 litres, the bunker fuel spill in English Bay was relatively small — yet the stakes of that spill couldn’t be much higher.

With Enbridge and Kinder Morgan both hoping to build oil pipelines to B.C., which would significantly increase oil tanker traffic in the province’s inside coastal waters, a dramatically mishandled marine oil spill raises all sorts of questions — questions the federal government does not appear well-positioned to answer, despite its aggressive push for West Coast oil exports.

“Obviously, from the oil industry’s perspective, you couldn’t have picked a worse place to have an oil spill,” Jim Stanford, economist at Unifor and founder of the Progressive Economics Forum, told DeSmog Canada.

While the federal government insisted its response was “world-class,” a former commander of the shuttered Kits Coast Guard station blamed the six-hour delay in even deploying a boom to contain the oil on the closure of that station in 2013 — a move that is reported to have saved the federal government at estimated $700,000 a year.

The English Bay spill, beyond being a systemic failure, has been a total PR disaster.

“It’s a very dramatic indication of the failure of our environmental safeguards around transportation and energy,” Stanford said.

Will The Real Energy Superpower Please Stand Up

Canada’s aggressive “energy superpower” push — a Harper government priority that has been accompanied by the elimination of environmental laws— has drawn criticism from all corners, and not just domestically.

The Obama administration indicated the fate of TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, which has been caught in a protracted review process for six years, was intrinsically tied up with the oilsands’ growing greenhouse gas emissions. The European Union came close to labelling oilsand’s crude as high-carbon due to its energy-intensive extraction and refining process (that move was thwarted by intensive lobbying by the Canadian and Albertan governments). 

Back at home, the undercutting of environmental reviews and elimination of environmental laws has resulting in growing citizen concern about Canada’s oilsands development and record on climate change, as demonstrated by recent climate and pipeline protests.

Martha Hall Findlay, former Liberal MP and executive fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, says the federal government has blown the environmental file.

“You don’t poke people in the eye when the rest of the world is saying there are significant environmental concerns,” she said.

“I think it’s smart to acknowledge that and address it. Our current federal government has done the opposite in many ways. And, importantly, have been seen to be doing the opposite. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that it was a factor in Obama’s decision on Keystone.”

With Friends Like These Who Needs Protesters?

What’s become clearer is that such a myopic approach to policymaking has created difficult conditions for the extractive industries.

“The Harper government’s bloody-mindedness on environmental issues has actually done more to bog down large resource projects than anything the environmental movement could have done,” Rick Smith, executive director of the Broadbent Institute, said.

“What it’s done is make First Nations, local communities and environmentalists feel marginalized and angry.”

Keith Stewart of Greenpeace Canada echoed the sentiment, saying complaints are now likely to emerge from beyond the protest crowd: “If the government won’t listen to Canadians about it, they’re soon going to have to listen to our would-be customers.”

While there’s some significant progress occurring on the provincial front on the climate change file, that can’t make up for the lack of federal leadership.

“People outside Canada don’t necessarily understand the nuances of the different levels of governance within the country,” notes Anthony Heyes, University of Ottawa economics professor and Canada Research Chair in Environmental Economics. “Outsiders see it as a country that has a relatively disappointing record in not just greenhouse gas emissions in an absolute way, but also against international commitments..”

Hall Findlay added that if the federal government had followed the lead of the provinces, Keystone XL might have been approved. But at this point, piecemeal climate commitments from the provinces might not be enough.

An associated problem is the fact that Harper bet the economy on the success of the oil and gas sector (Thomas Walkom put it nicely in a piece for the Toronto Star: “Harper has his own unspoken industrial policy. It can be summed up in a word: pipelines.”)

Stanford suggests that such infatuation has come at the cost of other industries — manufacturing, tourism, transportation — due to the high dollar being pegged to an extremely volatile resource.

“You would have needed a government with the foresight and courage to actively push against that in order to protect our environment, obviously, but also our economic diversity and long-run prosperity instead of riding the bandwagon as they did,” he said.

Stanford notes that the employment rate is currently as low as it was in the summer of 2009, the worst moment of the global recession. That’s got to sting for a party that advertises its leader as a trained economist — not an elitist lawyer or under-qualified teacher.

Ultimately, Harper’s mismanagement of the energy and environment file — and most importantly the nexus of those two things — might be more of a gift than a burden for those who want to see progress on climate change.

“In a way, the fact that Stephen Harper has burned any semblance of federal environmental regulation to the ground is an opportunity for Canadians to rebuild something at the federal level that’s new, truly modern and forward thinking,” Smith says.

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Late Saturday afternoon, Transport Canada officially cleared the Marathassa to leave Canadian waters. As it slowly moves out of the Salish Sea, the bulk carrier leaves angry mayors, a combative coast guard, a distrustful public and many, many questions in its wake.

Even U.S. authorities are anxiously looking north wondering if Canada knows anything about marine oil spill response. 

What we know about this spill is important, but there’s a lot more we don’t know, and might never know, about what happened in English Bay.

We Don't Know the Total Volume of Fuel Spilled, and Maybe Never Will 

In his first press conference after the April 8th spill, Commander Roger Girouard of the Canadian Coast Guard stated that the volume of the spill was 2,700 litres, or approximately 17 barrels of bunker C fuel. He reiterated this point several times at media appearances and press conferences in the weeks following the spill. Federal Industry Minister James Moore echoed his comments.

Vancouver City Manager Penny Ballem disagrees. In her presentation to Vancouver City Council after the spill, she quoted officials saying that figure is incorrect and the real volume is likely in the range of 3,000 – 5,000 litres spilled.

Similarly, there’s the reality that even the most successful oil spill cleanup efforts only recover a small portion of the oil. In 2010, Gerald Graham, president of Worldocean Consulting, a marine oil spill prevention and response planning firm based in British Columbia, told LiveScience.com that recovering between 10 and 15 per cent of conventional oil spilled in seawater is a ‘best case’ scenario.

Except bunker C fuel — the product spilled in English Bay — is not conventional: it is denser, more viscous and heavier than conventional crude oil. Unlike conventional crude oil, bunker C fuel is not certain to float on water surfaces, nor does it weather and dissolve as easily. On average only five to 10 per cent of the bunker C fuel will evaporate in the first 24 hours after a spill. Instead it breaks into tarballs and settles lower in the water column, sometimes as far down as one to three metres below the surface.

On April 9, Commander Girouard reported that cleanup crews had recovered approximately 1,400 litres of the oil spilled. A few days later, a statement from Coast Guard Commissioner Jody Thomas stated that cleanup crews recovered 80 per cent of fuel spilled within 36 hours after the spill.

If these figures are correct, then without counting the oil which washed up on Vancouver and West Vancouver beaches or the large ‘bathtub ring’ of bunker fuel oil encircling the Marathassa, the Coast Guard should have recovered approximately 2,200 litres of spilled oil in the first 36 hours (based on lower spill estimates). This is definitely possible, but extremely unlikely given past precedent of what constitutes a ‘best case’ cleanup.

But if total spill volumes are incorrect — as City Manager Ballem and others suggest — there is a lot of oil still unaccounted for.

It is worth noting that in the first 24 hours after the spill, oil traveled 12 kilometres to foul at least 10 beaches in Vancouver, West Vancouver and North Vancouver.

Would an Operational Kits Coast Guard Station Have Helped? Who Knows

In 2013, the federal government closed the Kitsilano Coast Guard station, consolidating operations with the Coast Guard Station in Delta, B.C. Both the City of Vancouver and the province of B.C. publicly objected to the closure, citing its importance in oil spill and disaster response efforts.

“The Kitsilano Coast Guard base has been one the most important public safety resources in and around the City of Vancouver, responding to over 300 calls each year. Vancouver is one of the busiest harbours in North America and has depended on robust search and rescue services that are professionally-trained and fully-resourced by the federal government. In the event of major freighter, cruise ship, or aviation emergency, we remain very concerned that the Kitsilano closure will put many additional lives in danger.” – Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson

Both Commander Girouard and Federal Industry Minister James Moore stated they believe the Kitsilano Coast Guard Station being open would have made no difference in the cleanup of this spill. Speaking to the media on April 12, Girouard said the station was never manned with environmental response experts, and would not have been called on in this scenario. James Moore echoed his comments.

According to Commander Girouard, the Kitsilano Coast Guard station had less than 100 metres of oil-absorbing booms, and that they were likely too old to be useful.

Retired Coast Guard Captain Tony Toxopeus, who served at the base, disagrees. So does Mike Cotter, General Manager of the Jericho Sailing Centre, which is located next door to the shuttered station. In an interview with CKNW’s Shane Woodford, Captain Toxopeus confirmed that the Kitsilano Coast Guard Station had two ships (a pollution response vehicle and an Osprey cutter), along with oil spill response equipment and staff trained in pollution response.

At the same time, an operational Kitsilano Coast Guard Station would have greatly reduced the response time for the spill.

As it stands, it took the Coast Guard more than three hours from the time the spill was reported to send a ship to investigate, a further four hours to set up an absorbent boom and a total 12 hours to completely encircle the Marathassa in a containment boom. In an open letter to Minister Moore, Mr. Cotter said:

“Had the Kitsilano Coast Guard Station remained open, the Osprey could have been on scene within 10 minutes in direct contact with the boater who originally reported the spill just after 5 pm on April 8. Her crew would’ve assessed the scene (the boater says he could tell the fuel was coming from the aft section of the source ship) and activated the PRV crew who would’ve been on scene and commenced spill containment within an hour of the report.”

Late last week, the federal government announced that it would also be closing the Vancouver office for its Marine Communications and Traffic Services. Now everything from marine safety communications co-ordination with rescue resources, vessel traffic services and waterway management, broadcast weather and sail plan services for the entire south coast and most of Vancouver Island will be managed out of the Victoria office.

As the Globe and Mail recently reported, officials in Washington State have serious doubts about the Canadian government's ability to address oil spills in the Puget Sound. The Washington Department of Ecology told the state's Governor that "B.C. lacks authority over marine waters, and their federal regime is probably a couple decades behind the system currently in place in Washington State."

A U.S. maritime lawyer also said if the U.S. Coast Guard scored an eight or nine on a worldwide 10-point spill response scale, Canada would score a one or two. 

We Don’t Know Who is Responsible for Monitoring Burrard Inlet for Long-term Spill Impacts

To be clear, the Burrard Inlet and the Salish sea have not been pristine waterways for a long time. E.coli contamination regularly closes local beaches to swimming in the summer, and the waterway is a working port. All of that considered, Vancouver beaches attract millions of people every year, and many people fish its waters for recreation or subsistence.

On April 15, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans banned fishing for shellfish and groundfish in Burrard Inlet, citing concerns about the Marathassa spill. DFO calls the closure a precautionary measure, and gives no indication of when the fisheries may reopen.

The closure makes sense, of course. While the Marathassa spill was minor,  toxins from bunker C fuel can stay in the water for a very long time. A study done by U.S. Department of Fisheries scientists on a 2007 bunker C fuel spill in San Francisco harbour found the spill had decimated local herring stocks and left surviving fish with extensive birth defects and short life spans. This persisted for at least three years after the spill.

But Vancouver’s waters are different. According to Dr. Peter Ross, director of the Vancouver Aquarium’s Ocean Pollution Research Program, there’s no baseline data for English Bay’s waters, nor is there a cohesive long-term monitoring program. Both of these deficiencies make it hard to measure long term impacts.

Since coastal waters fall under the purview of the federal government, it should be the responsibility of the DFO to monitor long-term impacts. But millions of dollars in cuts by the federal government have decimated DFO budgets, closing programs and leaving at least 50 scientists out of work. This included Dr. Ross, who used to run a marine toxicology program through DFO. It no longer exists.

The Vancouver Aquarium, the City of Vancouver and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans have all collected water samples independently following the spill. Unfortunately, as Dr. Ross says, "There is no official clarity around who is to monitor the effects of a spill."

WWKMD? We Don’t Know What Kinder Morgan Would Do Differently

For all the opacity of the government response, one thing is crystal clear after the Marathassa spill: we could, and must, do better by these waters. As the National Energy Board considers approval of the Kinder Morgan TransMountain tanker and pipeline expansion, both parties could be learning from the Marathassa response and ensuring that future spill preparedness and response is truly ‘world-class.' But, as always, there’s a problem.

Namely, that Kinder Morgan refuses to publicly reveal any of its oil spill cleanup plans for Burrard Inlet — even though the company owns 50.9 per cent of Western Canada Marine Response Company, the lead party responsible for cleanup operations on the Marathassa spill and the primary subcontractor for any future oil spills on the B.C. south coast.

This leaves all levels of government in the dark about what might happen if the new twinned Kinder Morgan pipeline ruptures again (as it did in 2007), or one of the hundreds of new Aframax-sized tankers (40,000 tonnes larger than the Marathassa bulk carrier) leaks diluted bitumen into English Bay.

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On Thursday toxic oil was washing up on the shores of Kitsilano Beach and English Bay in Vancouver as cleanup crews tried to contain a sizeable bunker fuel spill surrounding a bulk carrier.

Specific details about how the spill occurred are murky so far. According to MarineTraffic, a website that monitors seagoing shipping, a Panamax bulk carrier named the Marathassa arrived in the Port of Metro Vancouver on April 6th after a 2.5 week journey from South Korea. Sometime after 5 p.m. Wednesday, a sheen of oil was observed by boaters around the ship and spill cleanup was initiated. 

The federal government notified the city of Vancouver of the spill at 6 a.m. Thursday, more than 12 hours after the spill was initially reported.

*Update, 1:30pm April 10: Fuel from the spill is now reported to have reached beaches in West Vancouver and Vancouverites have expressed concern not enough is being done to prevent the spread of oil along shorelines or to clean up popular city beaches. Premier Christy Clark responded to the incident Friday, saying "Two years ago I said we weren't ready. They've proven that in the last couple days and we saw that with the Simushir as well. Somebody needs to do a better job of protecting our coast."

CKNW's Shane Woodford reported that a special pollution response boat formerly stationed at the now shuttered Kitsilano Coast Guard base is sitting empty with no crew at Sea Island base in Richmond. Former Kits base commander Fred Moxey told Woodford that if Kits Base was still active today crews would have been on scene at the spill in six minutes with the equipment to deal with the situation.

Since the spill was discovered, cleanup teams have deployed more than 2,600 metres of oil-containing boom, and as of 9 a.m. West Coast Marine Response Corporation had recovered close to one tonne of oil. It is unclear how much oil was spilled or how much fuel the Marathassa had in its tanks.

According to Miriam Van Roosmalen, regional director of Coast Guard programs for the western region and part of the spill’s incident command group, the Canadian Coast Guard is the lead federal body responding to the spill.

Van Roosmalen said monitoring of the spill is ongoing but did confirm aerial photographs of English Bay show the size of the spill is larger than previously reported.

ICYMI: @Chad_Dey's aerial pics of #VanFuelSpill at #EnglishBay from the News1130 Air Patrol. Substance is toxic. pic.twitter.com/ZOEHnBWVsS

— News1130 (@News1130radio) April 9, 2015

She added the incident will remain what she called a “mystery spill” until the source of the fuel is confirmed. The suspected ship’s owner is co-operating with the ongoing investigation, Van Roosmalen said.

Currently Port Metro Vancouver, Transport Canada, Environment Canada, B.C Ministry of Environment, City of Vancouver and the West Coast Marine Response Corporation are the key players responding to the incident.

According to Penny Ballem, city manager for Vancouver, it took more than 12 hours for the federal government to notify city officials of the spill.

City probing delayed response to #EnglishBay #VanFuelSpill http://t.co/pMyiFYWwmE And @pmharper wants more tankers! pic.twitter.com/bxPnqBfNFZ

— AFreeMansLife (@AFreeMansLife) April 9, 2015

Bunker Fuel Has Similarities to Oilsands Bitumen

According to a tweet from the Vancouver Fire Department, the spill is confirmed as bunker fuel — a type of heavy oil used as fuel by large ships.

Bunker fuel shares similar qualities to diluted bitumen (the oil product that would be transported inside the proposed TransMountain pipeline expansion and that was spilled during pipeline ruptures in Mayflower, Arkansas, and Kalamazoo, Michigan) in that it is thick, heavy oil that is particularly difficult to clean up from water.

Bunker fuel is lighter than bitumen, however, and doesn't contain diluents, which are used to thin bitumen to increase its flow. When spilled in marine environments, the lighter components of diluted bitumen evaporate, leaving the heavier, tar-like remainder to mix with sediment and sink, as occurred in the Kalamazoo River.*

According to a material safety data sheet, bunker fuel is a viscous liquid that is considered toxic and both an acute and chronic health hazard.

Bunker fuel is produced by heating conventional petroleum through a process called fractional distillation whereby extreme heat is used to break up oil into different components like naphtha, gasoline and diesel.

The product left over at the end of this process is bunker fuel. Only large ships with the space to heat their fuel before combusting it use this type of fuel.

Like bitumen, bunker fuel is extremely toxic and extremely dense. Its high viscosity allows it to coat surfaces (shorelines, fish, seabirds) quickly, and it is not easily removed.

The Office of Response and Restoration at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says this about bunker fuel spills:

“[It] is a persistent oil; only 5-10 per cent is expected to evaporate within the first hours of a spill. Consequently, the oil can be carried hundreds of miles in the form of scattered tarballs by winds and currents. The tarballs will vary in diameter from several yards to a few inches and may be very difficult to detect visually or with remote sensing techniques.”

According to a 2013 report commissioned by the province of B.C., approximate 42 million cubic metres of bunker fuel, also known as persistent oil, is transported in B.C. waters each year.

Vancouver ports are the busiest marine ports in Canada.

Will Chemical Dispersants be Used in Cleanup?

According to Karen Wristen of Living Oceans Society, there are unclear rules determining the use of chemical dispersants for oil spill cleanup in Canada.

“The situation is in flux but as it stands right now Environment Canada has to approve on a case by case basis the use of dispersants,” she said, adding "there is no agreed framework for making that decision.”

“They’re looking at the ‘net environmental benefit’ for using dispersants,” she said. “How they determine that is a deep, dark secret.”

Wristen said dispersants have previously been used to clean oil spilled on rocks and boulders at Vancouver’s Westshore terminal. But she added she doesn’t think dispersants would be useful for a spill like the one currently ongoing in English Bay.

“Dispersants are largely not effective against heavier oil. They are much better with conventional oil that can break up into smaller droplets.”

“In cold water, heavy oil becomes extremely viscous and forms clumps and tar balls. Those are extraordinarily resistant to chemical dispersion,” Wristen said. “They’re better being cleaned up with a shovel.”

“World Class” Spill Prevention and Response Standards in Question

DeSmog Canada requested comment from Transport Canada, the Canadian Coast Guard and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but none of these agencies were able to provide specific information on the rules and regulations concerning fuel spills from vessels of this kind.

In early 2013 Vancouverites expressed outrage at the Harper government’s decision to close the Kitsilano Coast Guard station.

Remember when voting in fed elxn BC #cpc MP's killed off coast guard station in vancouver #cdnpoli #VanFuelSpill pic.twitter.com/vO3GFdJHiQ

— Pete Quily (@pqpolitics) April 9, 2015

Wristen said the spill calls into question the federal government’s claim it has world-class spill prevention and response standards in place.

“Why is this happening on Kits beach if we’re so able to prevent spills and clean things up?” she said.

“It certainly is a wake up call for the federal government claiming we have world class standards.”

* Some changes were made after publication to clarify the differences and similarities between bunker fuel and bitumen.

Image Credit: Jonathan Ickikawa via Flickr

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