On a late afternoon in early October, Anja Hutgens and Hans Kirschbaum walk out of their home at the edge of an expansive field dotted with black Angus cows in B.C.’s south Peace River region. They herd their two dogs into the back of their pickup truck and drive up the long, steep dirt driveway that takes them into a world they used to love but now barely recognize.

After the ascent from the bucolic valley bottom, Kirschbaum guides the truck onto an industrial gravel road. Soon the couple passes by a natural gas processing plant, where a spire of flame shoots out of a tall flare stack. Beyond that lies a cavernous industrial water pit, filled with water from the nearby Pine River. And beyond that, a deforested patch of land dominated by two giant steel containers painted a Mediterranean blue and filled to near capacity with a menacing brew of rust-coloured wastewater. Strips of colourful plastic flagging hang above the containers, known as C-rings, to warn ducks and geese to stay out. Birds would quickly die in the stuff. Cows would perish drinking it.

At the entrance to the clearing, the natural gas company operating in the immediate region, Crew Energy, has posted a sign emblazoned with the internationally recognized radiation warning symbol. Beside the symbol is another sign saying that “NORM” may be in the neighbourhood.

The unassuming acronym, Hutgens matter-of-factly explains, stands for naturally occurring radioactive materials. But there is nothing natural about radioactive elements including radium, thallium and selenium suddenly appearing on the threshold of Hutgens and Kirschbaum’s home and ranch. Something brought those potentially dangerous contaminants to their doorstep, and that something is the natural gas industry.

Contaminated fracking wastewater fills two C-rings at the top of the hill above Penalty Ranch. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

Hutgens and Kirschbaum have been here before and know what to look for. They walk up to a spongy piece of industrial cloth lying at the base of one of the C-rings. The cloth is there to absorb any wastewater that may spill as trucks offload it into the tanks. 

Hutgens pulls a small device about the size of a cellphone out of her coat pocket and turns it on. It’s a Geiger counter, which detects radiation. She lowers it until it almost touches the cloth. Instantly, clicks begin to emanate from the counter as radioactive particles interact with gas inside the counter’s chamber. 

It doesn’t take long for the counter to record 100 clicks per minute, at which point an alarm goes off. But the clicks just keep coming, before topping out at 170 counts per minute, meaning the radiation level here is much higher than the normal, naturally occurring background radiation that surrounds us at low levels from sources such as the sun. 

Hutgens and Kirschbaum have repeatedly asked Crew Energy and the BC Oil and Gas Commission to test the water inside the C-rings as well as the accumulated muck at the bottom of them, but they say the company has refused, leading the couple to take matters into their own hands so they know what they’re up against.

Anja Hutgens holds a Geiger counter, which detects radiation, above a piece of cloth placed along a C-ring to collect spilled wastewater. Soon, an alarm starts to sound. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Anja Hutgens and Hans Kirschbaum rely on a Geiger counter to get an idea of what’s in the wastewater in the C-rings by their property because they say the company that owns them refuses to reveal any information. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

After turning the Geiger counter off, Hutgens and Kirschbaum return to the pickup truck, which is parked just in front of a metal grid known as a cattle guard that’s intended to keep their cows from wandering onto the site.

“We’re not against the gas industry,” Hutgens says. “I mean, we all need those resources. We all depend on it as well. But there need to be boundaries. And first of all, we must protect our water resources, which is the most important thing of all.”

Water is everything to ranchers and B.C.’s natural gas industry

Water is everything to the Peace River region’s ranchers and farmers. But it’s also everything to the region’s natural gas industry. And as that industry rapidly expands its water-intensive fracking operations, people like Hutgens and Kirschbaum fear their critical water sources could dry up or become poisoned.

During fracking, tremendous volumes of water, sand and chemicals are pumped at extreme pressure into rock formations deep below ground. The earthquake-inducing force at which all that water is pumped busts open or fractures the rock, allowing trapped oil and gas to be released. But much of the pumped water then flows back to the surface, contaminated with whatever it has come into contact with underground. Typically, it is so salty that it would be lethal to all aquatic life if it was piped into a stream. Other contaminants typically include trace metals, chemicals and hydrocarbons. And yes, sometimes, radioactive materials. 

Anja Hutgens isn’t against the natural gas industry, but she wants it to respect water resources. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Hans Kirschbaum’s father bought Penalty Ranch 40 years ago, back when there was much less industrial activity in the Peace River region. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

The amount of wastewater being generated by the fracking industry is dizzying. In just the immediate vicinity, there are as many as 21 C-rings belonging to Crew Energy, each capable of holding 5,000 cubic metres of wastewater — enough to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools. If just a fraction of that water spilled or seeped into the ground at the wrong place, the consequences could be devastating for their ranch. 

And Crew Energy is just one of many companies operating in the region. Other companies — including Ovintiv (formerly Encana), Shell and Canadian Natural Resources — have even bigger operations, producing greater volumes of wastewater. 

For 40 years, a natural spring has been the primary source of drinking water at Penalty Ranch, which was purchased by Kirschbaum’s father 40 years ago after he journeyed to northeast B.C. from his home in Bavaria, Germany. The spring is also an essential water source for the couple’s 300 head of thirsty cattle. 

Hutgens and Kirschbaum’s greatest fear is that the industrial activity at the top of the hill above their ranch will lead to the contamination of their water.

In July, Crew Energy received permits from the BC Oil and Gas Commission to dramatically increase the amount of wastewater stored near the ranch. The company’s plan involves building two massive wastewater pits and retiring all but eight of its C-rings. 

Each pit would require excavating holes deep into the earth. The pits would then be lined with three layers of thick industrial plastic and filled with up to 60,000 cubic metres of wastewater each. If the pits proceed, it will mean that eventually Crew Energy can store enough wastewater — potentially radioactive — to fill 64 Olympic-sized swimming pools close to the ranch and Worth Marsh, a body of water that may be the spring’s water source.

Anja Hutgens gives reporter Ben Parfitt a tour of Penalty Ranch. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

In an effort to stop this plan from moving forward, Hutgens and Kirschbaum appealed to the quasi-judicial Oil and Gas Appeal Tribunal to rescind the permits. A video hearing was held earlier this month and the couple expects a ruling by the early new year.

In documents filed with the tribunal, Crew Energy said digging the pits will ultimately save it millions of dollars because it will no longer have to truck its wastewater to dispersed C-rings. 

But Hutgens and Kirschbaum say the pits pose a danger far greater than the C-rings. They’re bigger and they’re sunk into the earth. If the pits leak — as similar pits have — the highly toxic water will enter the ground deep below the surface, where it can more readily contaminate aquifers that feed springs. 

“Our biggest worry is our natural spring, our water situation. If we were to lose that, or it became contaminated, it would simply be devastating to our business. I do not see how we could get over that,” Hutgens says, as a gust of wind whips her thick mop of hair about.

Underscoring her concerns, just a short distance away, one of the couple’s cows tilts its head into a pipe to drink the spring water trickling down to the field from the wooded slope above. 

Hans Kirschbaum (left), Anja Hutgens and reporter Ben Parfitt discuss the impacts the natural gas industry is having on agricultural lands. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

B.C. oil and gas versus cattle and crops

When farming and fossil fuel interests butt heads, oil and gas almost always trumps cattle and crops. And the stakes just keep getting higher. The more wells the industry drills and fracks, the more water it uses. The more water it uses, the more wastewater it generates — waste that is rarely if ever treated because it is so toxic.

Much of natural gas development, as previously reported in The Narwhal, now occurs directly on farms or agricultural leases that farmers hold on Crown or publicly owned lands. Significantly, many of those lands are in B.C.’s Agricultural Land Reserve. 

When the reserve was created in 1973, it was hailed as one of the most progressive pieces of farm-protecting legislation in the world. It was designed to bring an end to the steady erosion of farmland in the province, which was then losing about 6,000 to 7,000 hectares each year to other land uses, particularly urban development.

A cow drinks natural spring water at the Penalty Ranch. The spring lies between the ranch and heavily contaminated wastewater storage sites. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Penalty Ranch is home to 300 head of thirsty cow, which rely on spring water that could be contaminated by encroaching natural gas operations. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

But despite the reserve, fossil fuel industry development continues to erode the farmland base in the energy-rich northeast corner of the province.  

“The development of the energy sector has exceeded the capacity of the current regulatory environment to protect farmland,” concluded a committee appointed by Agriculture Minister Lana Popham to examine threats posed to the reserve. 

The committee, chaired by former independent MLA Vicki Huntington, went on to note in its 2018 report that unrelenting energy industry incursions on farmlands in northeast B.C. were making it “increasingly difficult for many farmers and ranches to effectively use their land.”  

The committee called on the government to ensure that provincial agencies like the BC Oil and Gas Commission worked more closely with the B.C. Ministry of Agriculture to help the province’s “increasingly besieged agricultural sector.”

Oil and Gas Appeal Tribunal has sided with industry in the past

Hutgens and Kirschbaum must now wait to see what the tribunal does in response to their pleas, but they know their chances of success are not good.

Penalty Ranch obtained agricultural leases from the B.C. Ministry of Forests decades ago allowing it to graze its cattle on some of the same Crown or publicly owned lands where Crew Energy later set up operations.

In 2016, alarmed by the company’s encroaching operations, Hutgens and Kirschbaum filed an appeal with the tribunal, asking it to rescind Crew Energy’s permits from the BC Oil and Gas Commission allowing it to clear two patches of land in preparation for drilling and fracking five new gas wells. 

They lost that appeal but were back before the tribunal again a year later fighting another Crew Energy plan to build three more gas well pads and drill and frack another 22 gas wells. Some of that drilling and fracking would run under Worth Marsh, according to Crew Energy’s diagrams.

Hans Kirschbaum (left), Anja Hutgens and Ben Parfitt watch the ranchers’ cattle graze on land that could be compromised by nearby industrial development. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Hutgens and Kirschbaum were concerned that drilling and fracking could disrupt and contaminate water flows from Worth Marsh — in turn harming their spring.

But the tribunal ultimately dismissed the couple’s appeals because the lands owned outright by Penalty Ranch were not directly impacted by the proposed industrial activities, only its agricultural leases were.

The couple also argued Crew could easily move elsewhere as the company had rights to drill and frack over a wide area of land. Already 10 pipelines, 50 gas wells, 12 C-rings and one large freshwater storage pit was located on lands leased by Penalty Ranch. 

But once again, the tribunal was not swayed.

Crew Energy refuses to reveal information about toxic waste

In documents filed with the tribunal, Crew Energy said the toxic water entering the pits following the fracking process will “undergo a filtration and separation process” before being pumped in.

But when The Narwhal emailed Paul Dever, Crew Energy’s vice-president, to ask about the company’s treatment plans, he refused to answer any questions and declined an interview request.

Questions included: where does Crew Energy take radioactive waste for disposal? Where does the company truck any of the muck that accumulates at the bottom of such pits? And what does Crew plan to do should one or both pits fail?

Crew Energy refused to answer questions about how it handles toxic waste in its C-rings and how it will handle such waste from its proposed pits. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

“Crew Energy Inc. adheres to legislative and regulatory requirements regarding its operations in British Columbia, as regulated by the British Columbia Oil and Gas Commission,” Dever said in a brief email.

Dever did not expand on what those requirements were. But a scientific review of fracking operations released by a panel of experts in June 2019 found that radioactive material can accumulate in tanks and pits at fracking operations and B.C.’s regulations governing potentially radioactive waste in such pits is not as rigorous as it could be.

After reviewing wastewater pits at several fracking operations across B.C., the panel characterized the risk of leaks from containment ponds as “moderate to high.” 

Two experts interviewed for the review told the panel’s three scientists that “they were not aware of any studies on NORM in B.C., and that generally there is a lack of water quality data in B.C.,” especially data on NORM concentrations.

The review also found that companies themselves are responsible for identifying radioactive waste in their fracking operations and that there are no wastewater treatment facilities for radioactive water in B.C.

The panel was also told that there are virtually no searchable provincial records detailing where radioactive wastes originating in the province are sent.

Wastewater pits have failed before

Seven years ago, pits very similar to the ones Crew Energy plans to build leaked, resulting in a massive cleanup effort. The failure occurred just north of Beryl Prairie, a farming enclave about a two-hour drive from Penalty Ranch, where Talisman Energy managed four wastewater pits.

The leaks in one pit likely began in January 2013. But it was almost six months before Talisman Energy reported it to the BC Oil and Gas Commission. In the meantime, toxins flowed unchecked from the pit to the earth and groundwater below. Leaks were subsequently discovered at a second pit. As reported in The Narwhal, the contaminants initially discovered at the pit sites included arsenic, barium, cadmium, lithium and lead.

Shortly after the environmental disaster began, Talisman sold its operations in the region to Progress Energy Canada, a subsidiary of the giant state-owned Malaysian corporation, Petronas. 

Documents obtained by The Narwhal show the company that coordinated the cleanup, Secure Energy, had the muck at the bottom of the pits tested and the results confirmed the presence of radioactive radium, thorium and uranium at levels that are dangerous to people. 

This presented the company with a huge dilemma: how was it to get rid of all that radioactive waste — initially 15,000 cubic metres, or enough to fill six Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to correspondences between Secure Energy and the province.

Reporter Ben Parfitt looks onto a wastewater pit owned by Petronas, one of many natural gas companies operating in the Peace River region. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Secure Energy tried unsuccessfully to get the Ministry of Environment to allow the muck to be pumped into a hole in the earth at a distant “disposal well” near Fort Nelson, 500 kilometres away from the pits. But disposal wells are designed to take contaminated water, not muck, and certainly not radioactive muck. The ministry declined the application.

Ultimately, Progress Energy paid for the contaminated muck to be trucked across two provincial borders to an underground salt cavern disposal facility near Unity, Sask., owned and operated by Tervita Corporation.

Tervita also owns the sprawling Silverberry Landfill — about a 45-minute drive north of Fort St. John — which received thousands of cubic metres of contaminated soils from the pits.

The Narwhal filed 11 questions with Tervita Corporation, including what fees it charges companies to drop off radioactive wastes, how much waste trucks typically deliver at a time and how waste deliveries and disposals are tracked.

But, like Crew Energy, Tervita declined to directly answer a single question.

“We take pride in responsibly managing all aspects of our business to ensure compliance with relevant environmental and safety legislation, regulations and standards,” Kelly Sansom, Tervita’s communications manager, said in an email.

Petronas owns two giant wastewater pits near the rural community of Beryl Prairie. The pits are just down the road from similar pits that failed in 2013, triggering a massive cleanup. Photo: Jayce Hawkins / The Narwhal

The costs to clean up the failed pits has never been disclosed.

But based on a previous report by The Narwhal — which detailed initial cleanup costs at another wastewater pit suspected of leaking and contaminating groundwater and soil — the cost to truck away the wastewater alone would have been in the millions of dollars. 

If companies go bankrupt, taxpayers could end up on the hook for covering some or all of the cleanup costs. 

And getting rid of the contaminated water would have been only the beginning of a laborious process involving excavating and trucking away contaminated soils, disposing of the pits’ contaminated liners and moving all the radioactive mud far, far away.

Progress Energy has now installed four much larger wastewater pits just four kilometres east of Beryl Prairie, where all signs of the environmental calamity have been wiped away. All that remains there now is a recently graded field, populated with patches of wild grasses and weeds. 

Fracking radiation ‘(literally) off the charts’: BC Oil and Gas Commission

The BC Oil and Gas Commission has long known that the shale rock formations natural gas companies typically drill into and frack can be hotspots for radiation.

According to an email obtained by The Narwhal, the commission’s senior petroleum geologist wrote to staff in 2016 to say that some of those formations “would be expected to have NORMs” at concentrations that were “(literally) off the charts.”  

Despite this, the commission does not require fracking companies to test for the presence of radioactive materials and there is no requirement for companies that do testing to submit the results to the commission.

Karen Hosford, an environmental consultant who has worked in the mining industry for companies like Teck Resources and who assisted Hutgens and Kirschbaum in preparing their appeal, calls the lack of testing requirements “crazy.” 

Crew Energy plans to replace several of its C-rings with wastewater pits, which some people say are more likely to cause serious environmental damage if they fail. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

It was that lack of a commitment that led Hutgens and Kirschbaum to ask Crew Energy if they could collect their own samples for analysis. But the company denied the request, Hosford said.

“Basically, there’s no onus on the company to do anything. They hide behind the regulator, and the regulator protects them,” Hosford told The Narwhal.

If the wastewater pits are dug near Penalty Ranch, both Crew Energy and the commission say there will be additional safeguards in place to prevent leaks. Instead of only two liners in the pits — as was the case at the environmental disaster at Beryl Prairie — there will be three.  

But that’s cold comfort to Hutgens and Kirschbaum. If two liners can fail, so can three.

Calls for Crew Energy to pay penalty in event of failure

When Kirschbaum’s father, Karl, bought Penalty Ranch, he learned the previous owner had picked the name in honour of a tradition at the ranch. If a ranch hand did something dumb like failing to latch a gate, they had to hoe a garden or muck out a horse stall as a penalty at the end of the day.

Kirschbaum doesn’t want the pits. But if they do go in, he says Crew Energy should pay a penalty of sorts if things go wrong.

Penalty Ranch’s name was inspired by a tradition at the site: if you make a mistake, you pay for it. Hans Kirschbaum would like natural gas companies to follow that same rule. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

Ranchers have raised cattle at Penalty Ranch for decades. Encroaching natural gas operations put that tradition at risk. Photo: Matt Miles / The Narwhal

If the first and second liners in the pits start to leak, Kirschbaum thinks the company should have to immediately absorb the costs associated with swiftly draining all of the water and muck out of the pits before the third layer and last line of defence fails as well. “The pit should be emptied and liner one and liner two fixed,” Kirschbaum says.

Hutgens agrees. As dusk approaches and she and Kirschbaum prepare to leave Crew’s C-rings behind, it doesn’t take a Geiger counter to see that whether the fracking industry’s wastewater is stored in a pit dug into the earth or in tanks above ground, it is dangerous stuff.

“We love living in such a beautiful place,” Hutgens says. “But it’s heartbreaking to see how our once so quiet and natural ranch is turning into an industrial site. There has to be a bit more of a balance.”

And with that, she and Kirschbaum get back in their pickup truck and head home.

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B.C. rarely inspects hazardous waste handlers even though the province knows companies routinely break the rules, an investigation by The Narwhal reveals.

The Narwhal has also learned that even when provincial environmental compliance and enforcement staff do check companies, it’s virtually impossible for them to effectively investigate because the government stopped producing a digital database of shipments at the end of 2014 and now stuffs paper documents into cardboard boxes without a filing system.

Provincial investigators  — as well as journalists and members of the public — can no longer easily access information on where companies are picking up and moving hazardous waste such as batteries laden with corrosive acids, dangerous flammable liquids, spent and carcinogenic dry cleaning fluids, biomedical waste from hospitals, lung-destroying asbestos fibres and industrial sludges contaminated with heavy metals and pesticides. 

And if anyone outside of the government wants access to that information, they’ll have to pay an exorbitant amount. When The Narwhal requested a complete paper record of the most recent year of hazardous waste shipments, it was told it would have to pay  $125,910 to obtain the documents.

Andrew Gage, a lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, said the change to a paper-only system is “hugely problematic” from a law enforcement perspective given the “high levels of non-compliance” by companies in an industry that has associations with organized crime.

Toxic waste handlers break the rules 70 per cent of the time

Since the electronic database was scrapped at the end of 2014, the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy has conducted more than 530 inspections of hazardous waste handlers, according to senior public relations officer David Karn. The inspections include companies generating and receiving hazardous waste as well as those transporting the waste. 

Without the database, it is hard to put the number of inspections in perspective, but nearly 70,000 shipments were reported in 2014, suggesting only a small fraction are checked. 

The companies inspected weren’t in full compliance with provincial hazardous waste regulations 70 per cent of the time.

In 48 per cent of cases, Karn said the infractions were minor in nature and presented a “low risk” to the public. Typical violations included “insufficient” labelling or storage of waste. In such cases, the companies were issued “advisories” to correct business practices.

In the remaining 22 per cent of cases, companies were issued warnings for violating provincial regulations in more serious ways or were subject to more exhaustive investigations. 

The Narwhal asked the ministry if it could review documents related to those cases but was told it would have to file freedom of information requests to obtain them, a time-consuming process that can take months and often results in the return of heavily redacted pages.

The ministry did furnish a list, however, of some of the companies that were the subject of more thorough investigations, including Canoe Forest Products, United Concrete & Gravel, Sumas Environmental Services, Bio-Tox Medical Systems and El Cheapo’s Auto Wrecking & Towing.

The list also included Load ’Em Up Contracting, which in 2015 was fined $575 for “knowingly” providing “false information” on the hazardous waste it was shipping.

By using data from the last digitized hazardous waste record, The Narwhal was able to glean some understanding of what Load ’Em Up’s business dealings were in the year prior to receiving its fine.

The record shows that in 2014, the company picked up and trucked nearly 5.5 million litres — plus an additional 500,000 kilograms — of hazardous materials including waste oils and other lubricants, solvents, petroleum distillates, flammable liquids, contaminated soils and various other unidentified “environmentally hazardous substances.” Its clients included forest companies, gas wholesalers, pipeline companies and mining companies. The waste would overflow two Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Gage said handing a fine to a company that knowingly breaks the rules is a ridiculous tool to use in an industry that makes huge amounts of money for handling substances, which, by their very definition, are harmful to human health and the environment.

He said the ministry should levy much stiffer penalties or charge offending companies and take them to court.

Minister of Environment and Climate Change Strategy George Heyman declined an interview request.

Loss of digital database makes it difficult for investigators to do their jobs

Under provincial law, companies handling hazardous waste have long been required to fill out paper manifests detailing the type of waste they are handling, where the waste is going and who is shipping and moving it. Copies of those manifests are then sent to the Ministry of Environment. Truck drivers transporting waste are also required to have those manifests with them in the event they are inspected or involved in an accident and there is a spill.

Until the end of 2014, two data entry clerks inputted details from the manifests into the government’s now-defunct database. If provincial investigators later decided to investigate a company, they could turn to the database to see what companies reported handling and crosscheck that against what the companies were actually transporting through spot inspections.

B.C.’s vanishing hazardous waste database

Gage said with the database now a thing of the past, the government has effectively stymied timely and effective enforcement efforts. 

“Anyone in law enforcement” knows that readily available data is “absolutely critical” to doing the job, he told The Narwhal.

“If [compliance and enforcement staff] are not able to review it easily, the entire value of all the work that they’re putting these companies through [by requiring them to fill out the manifests] and the entire benefit to the public is entirely undermined. So it’s hugely important.”

Access to information? Please pay $125,910

Late last year, The Narwhal filed a freedom of information request with the Ministry of Environment asking for a complete paper record of the most recent year of hazardous waste shipments. A month after filing the request, the  ministry responded, saying if The Narwhal wanted the record, it would have to pay $125,910. The government previously charged $100 for copies of the electronic dataset.

A letter from the Ministry of Citizens Services accompanied the response to the freedom of information request and explained that the massive bill was due to the volume of manifests. The Narwhal subsequently learned from the Environment Ministry that approximately 300,000 pages of waste manifests are generated each year and are stuffed into roughly 50 boxes with each box filled in the order that the manifests are received.

Hazardous waste handlers in B.C. move a range of toxic materials from lung-destroying asbestos fibres to biomedical waste from hospitals. Photo: Anna Vaczi / Shutterstock

In other words, no member of the public, nor the ministry for that matter, can readily retrieve one, let alone several, specific paper manifests because they are not filed alphabetically by company, waste type, waste generator, waste receiver or waste transporter.

Gage said it’s extremely troubling that information on hazardous waste handlers is so difficult and costly to obtain given the government knows there have been serious violations of hazardous waste laws in the province.

One of the more spectacular of those violations occurred in 2007 in Abbotsford, where a company had stockpiled thousands of rusting barrels of toxic waste, including explosive materials, at a leased warehouse, compelling then-environment minister Barry Penner to declare a state of emergency.

15 years and counting for digital filing option

In a global economy in which companies like Amazon and Shopify keep tabs on the shipment of vast quantities of consumer goods using electronic tracking technology, Gage said it’s baffling that B.C. has gone back to a paper-only system. 

Courier companies have used hand-held devices for years to track goods, he points out, and using them to track hazardous waste would be cost effective and would greatly assist provincial compliance and enforcement staff.

“In this electronic age,” Gage said, document filing “should be automated.” 

He imagines a system that allows provincial investigators to monitor the movements of hazardous waste in real time. “If there’s an issue with the manifest, then that’s picked up. Like they get an email saying, ‘There appears to be this quantity of hazardous waste that was delivered by this producer two weeks ago and we haven’t confirmation of where it went.’ ”

The ministry has thought about moving to an electronic filing system since at least 2005, but the idea still remains “in the scoping phase” and there are “no set timelines” for when such a system would be in place, the ministry said in response to questions from The Narwhal.

Cowichan Valley MLA Sonia Furstenau, who is running in the leadership race for the provincial Green Party and fought against the dumping of contaminated soils at Shawnigan Lake, called the slow progress toward a robust, timely hazardous waste reporting system inexcusable.

“There should absolutely be transparency when it comes to the movement of hazardous waste in the province and the expectation that there’s compliance with the regulations that exist and that there are consequences for non-compliance,” Furstenau told The Narwhal.

Furstenau called the current system “very worrying,” adding that “the potential impacts of hazardous and contaminated material on groundwater, surface water and air are significant.”

Meanwhile, Ontario has committed to fully moving to an electronic system, which it expects will be up and running by 2022.

Ontario first introduced an electronic filing option in 2002, according to Lindsay Davidson, a public affairs spokesperson at Ontario’s Ministry of Environment, Conservation and Parks. But the option was “ahead of its time,” he said. “Most facilities did not have ready access to electronic tools that would support electronic reporting from locations where waste was picked up.”

Ninety-nine per cent of hazardous waste manifests in Ontario are still filed by paper. But unlike B.C., Ontario continues to pay public servants to input key details from the paper manifests into a provincial database, Davidson said.

Paper system drives up costs, illegal dumping 

Usman Valiante, a senior policy analyst with the consultancy Cardwell Grove, has extensive experience in hazardous waste and waste recycling issues. He told The Narwhal that paper filing is not only archaic but is also dangerous because it creates an environment where companies are more likely to break the rules because of the time and expense involved in paper filing.  

Valiante said Ontario’s move toward electronic filing is actually being driven by one of the province’s biggest hazardous waste producers.

“Basically, the chemical industry and the hazardous waste management industry said, ‘This system is so inefficient, it’s driving up costs and in some cases it’s driving illegal dumping,’ ” Valiante said. “It’s all out of self-interest.” 

Electronic filing is also more useful to the industry, regulator and general public alike, Valiante said.

“An electronic system allows you to track stuff in real time, whereas a paper system doesn’t allow you any of that. Which is why, you know, Amazon doesn’t use a paper system.”

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Three years ago, as the B.C. government’s environmental record was being called into question during a dispute over the delivery of contaminated soils to Shawnigan Lake, the government quietly undercut the ability of public servants to investigate companies that were illegally dumping the worst wastes of the lot.

It stopped producing a critical database that tracked hazardous waste shipments across the province.

Worldwide, waste management companies have become vulnerable to takeover by organized crime or unscrupulous operators who undercut their competitors for contracts and then “dispose” of their waste by illegal means, disappearing toxic sludge much like a mobster gets rid of an associate he has just whacked.

British Columbia is not immune to such activity. I know.

I know, because on two separate occasions I used that now defunct database to show how two different companies had flagrantly violated provincial rules governing hazardous wastes. In one case, the operator was quite literally pumping hazardous wastes into the sewer system, ultimately forcing the government to declare a state of environmental emergency at the site.

Database shuttered as protests grew

The database provided key details on tens of thousands of hazardous waste shipments that occur in B.C. each year.

On any given day, those shipments may include the fluids from old electrical transformers and capacitors that are contaminated with carcinogenic polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs; waste fluids from the dry-cleaning industry, including tetrachloroethylene, a likely human carcinogen; oil-contaminated soils and wastewater; acid-leaching batteries; and large quantities of biomedical wastes generated at hospitals and health clinics.

That database is now gone, thanks to a decision by the previous BC Liberal government to stop paying anyone inside or outside government to produce it.

In response to questions, the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy confirmed that the government stopped producing digitized “waste manifest” records at the end of 2014, just as headlines were being generated across B.C. over contaminated soil deliveries to the Shawnigan Lake watershed, which supplies 12,000 Vancouver Island residents with their water.

But the ministry’s senior public affairs officer, David Karn, said that it is simply a coincidence that the then Liberal government halted the program at that time.

“There is no relationship between the date this service was discontinued and protests on Vancouver Island,” Karn said in an email.

Until the end of 2014, all companies handling hazardous wastes in B.C. were required by law to fill out paper forms that provided a wealth of information on each waste shipment. The required information included what precise wastes were being moved, who was moving them, and where they were being moved to. All of this and more was required under B.C.’s Hazardous Waste Regulation.

The information on those paper forms or manifests was then sent to the Environment Ministry, where one person inputted everything into a searchable database. With the information stored electronically, environmental investigators and citizens had a valuable investigative tool at their disposal, should they choose to use it. Instead of sifting through literally thousands of pages of paper forms, they could use the database to follow waste handlers’ toxic trails.

Eventually, Karn explained, the government elected to contract out the keyboarding work, presumably as a cost-saving measure.

“In 2011 government contracted the digitization of manifest data for hazardous waste movement/transport/shipment,” Karn wrote in response to questions. “A fee of $100 was charged for an Excel spreadsheet with the data organized by year. Requests averaged about 10 per year so interest was quite low. In 2014, the three-year contract to provide this service came to an end and was not renewed.”

Information used in investigations by ministry, journalists

Three people contacted by The Narwhal were all highly critical of the Ministry’s response.

Andrew Gage, a lawyer for West Coast Environmental Law, said that the government’s rationale appears to be that if not enough members of the public ask for documents then the government is justified in killing the information source. By default, Gage says, that means that provincial environmental officials themselves aren’t using it either.

“It certainly implies that their main criterion [for not producing the information] was public use not internal use, when it should be the other way around if anything,” Gage said.

“There’s a fundamental role that government should always be playing, which is protecting the public interest, whether the public knows it or not. That is the role of government.” — Sonia Furstenau, Green Party MLA

Green Party MLA Sonia Furstenau represents the Cowichan Valley. She fought against the dumping of contaminated soils at Shawnigan Lake long before becoming an MLA. (Contaminated soils may, in some cases, be considered hazardous depending on how heavily contaminated they are. For example, if petroleum by-products are present in high enough concentrations.)

Like Gage, Furstenau finds the government’s justification troubling. Insufficient public demand for a product is no excuse for halting the production of information that is in the public interest.

“I’m sort of wrapping my head around this as a reason to discontinue the monitoring of the movement of something as serious as hazardous waste, particularly in the midst of a serious building boom that is happening in the urban centres around B.C., when we know that these developments mean that there will be a significant uptick in industrial and contaminated and I suspect ultimately, hazardous wastes,” Furstenau said.

“There’s a fundamental role that government should always be playing, which is protecting the public interest, whether the public knows it or not. That is the role of government,” she said.

The toxic polluter

Sev Samulski, an Abbotsford businessman, couldn’t agree more.

In 2005 the province declared a state of emergency at a warehouse Samulski owned and had leased to waste handler, Canadian Petroleum Corporation (CPC).

Samulski, who heads a company that manufactures concrete blocks, said it is “totally flabbergasting” that the ministry would stop processing information that was instrumental in addressing the highly hazardous wastes CPC had stockpiled at his rented warehouse.

Much of the waste was in rusting barrels that were leaching their contents into the ground.

Some of those barrels contained chromium. Chromium 6, a metallic element commonly used in chrome plating as well as in dying, leather tanning and wood preserving, would earlier be fingered for a cluster of cancer cases in Hinkley, California, which became the subject of the Academy Award-winning film, Erin Brockovich.

A lawyer working for Samulski ultimately contacted me to explain his client’s woes. Working with the Ministry of Environment’s electronic waste manifest database I was able to do what anyone in the ministry could have done. I tracked both what was moving into CPC’s leased warehouse and what was purportedly moving out. What that simple audit showed was that 10.6 million litres of liquid hazardous wastes and another 400,000 kilograms of solid hazardous wastes had for all intents and purposes disappeared at CPC’s operations. Some of that toxic soup would later be confirmed to have been either pumped or allowed to flow unchecked into the municipality’s sewer system.

Further investigation showed that CPC owner, Ed Ilnicki, was associated with another waste management company, General Waste Disposal. The principal owners of General Waste had previously operated Aqua Clean Ships, a company doing business on Vancouver’s waterfront. During Aqua Clean’s time operating in Burrard Inlet, millions of litres of diesel oil-contaminated wastewater offloaded from cruise ships effectively disappeared. Again, using the same database, I was easily able to show that the company was taking in far more waste than it was declaring sending out for treatment. As a result of that investigation, Aqua Clean lost all its cruise ship business on the waterfront.

Samulski now says that had the waste manifest data not been available electronically at the time and used to conduct an independent investigation, the ministry may not have been forced to step in and declare a state of emergency at the site, which is what it did in September 2005, a half year after I did the audit and a feature story was published in The Georgia Straight.

Samulski says the resulting provincially ordered and taxpayer-funded cleanup at the site — a site he claimed with justification was a “fireball waiting to happen” — saved him from having to declare bankruptcy. It cost the province upwards of $1 million to clean up the site, while Samulski personally was out $437,000 in well-bore soils tests and other costs related to the environmental catastrophe at the site.

Ilnicki was eventually found guilty on three charges of failing to follow the Ministry of Environment’s orders to provide information on the hazardous wastes he had stockpiled in the Fraser Valley. He was fined $20,000 — less than half the amount it would eventually cost to have a consultant itemize all the hazardous wastes in those unmarked, rusting barrels, and just one-tenth the maximum fine he could have been assessed.

Ilnicki never paid the fine. Nor was he sentenced to jail time, although he could have faced six months incarceration along with being fined.

Environmental prosecutions a rarity

In 2011, Gage looked into the case and found much to be concerned about, writing in a West Coast Environmental Law newsletter, “It’s hard not to contrast the government’s tough on crime rhetoric with the rarity of jail time for environmental offenders.”

Gage went on to say: “We are not advocating for a dramatic increase in the incarceration for minor violations of environmental statutes. Nor do we necessarily accept the ‘law and order’ claims that jail time is always an effective deterrent. But where polluters are handling hazardous wastes or carrying on other business practices that could easily harm human health and entire ecosystems, we do think that failing to comply with the law is a big problem, and should be treated as seriously as we treat criminal offences.”

In light of the government’s decision to essentially scuttle the information source that was one of the causes of Ilnicki’s undoing, Gage told The Narwhal that he has another concern: the province appears less and less inclined even to prosecute environmental offenders at all, let alone fine them.

“The fact is that in many ways the B.C. government just doesn’t really do enforcement anymore of environmental laws,” Gage said. Doing away with a database that could help identify criminal activity just reinforces that impression, Gage said.

Gage’s worry is that as word circulates in the waste management industry that the ministry has effectively hamstrung itself by no longer producing the data that can be used to conduct audits, more companies may be tempted to break laws. Worse, he says, good companies that follow the rules — of which there are many — end up placing themselves at a commercial disadvantage with those that bend or outright break the rules.

“It sends a message that people who do follow the law are actually somehow saps,” Gage said. “They’re at a disadvantage. They can’t compete with those people who aren’t following the law. It actually penalizes the good actors.”

Gage’s contention that the ministry is less and less enthusiastic about chasing bad actors appears to be borne out by enforcement statistics themselves.

The Narwhal searched a government database and learned that in the past 10 years only one penalty has been handed out to a company for violating B.C.’s Hazardous Waste Regulations.

The sole company to be penalized according to the government’s compliance and enforcement statistics is Load Em Up Contracting Ltd., which was fined $575 for “knowingly” providing “false information.” The offence occurred in the Omineca Region some time in 2015. It is likely that during that ten-year time frame more than one million hazardous waste shipments occurred in the province.

“The fact is that in many ways the B.C. government just doesn’t really do enforcement anymore of environmental laws.” — Andrew Gage, West Coast Environmental Law

Furstenau says the lack of fines is troubling in and of itself, but is even more worrying when viewed against the backdrop of the “professional reliance” model put in place in the early years of the first Gordon Campbell-led Liberal governments.

Mark Haddock, who recently completed a review of professional reliance for Environment Minister George Heyman, describes professional reliance as a regime in which “government sets the natural resource management objectives or results to be achieved, professionals hired by proponents decide how those objectives or results will be met and government checks to ensure objectives have been achieved through compliance and enforcement.”

Haddock notes that the public’s confidence in that system has been sorely tested in recent years by things like the Mount Polley tailings pond failure and the contamination of the Hullcar Aquifer.

Current compliance and enforcement efforts do not provide an effective check, Haddock’s report found. Among the signs of a system in need of repair is the tracking of hazardous wastes.

“The integrity of the regime depends on strong checks and balances being in place, but also adequate ministry oversight,” Haddock said. That oversight, has been weakened “due to a lack of resources,” Haddock said, noting that the Environment Ministry “has not been able to compile information” from hazardous waste manifests.

That information, as Haddock asserted and Furstenau, Gage and Samulski would likely concur, is “essential to oversight” and the overall “integrity of the system.”

A vital compliance and enforcement tool has disappeared. And with it, perhaps mountains of toxic waste.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.