Governments love buzzwords — probably because they roll off the tongue so nicely that people often overlook the fact they’re meaningless.

Take one of the B.C. government’s favourite expressions of late: “world leading” oil spill response.

It’s included not once, but twice, in B.C.’s five conditions for approval of oil pipelines — used to give the green light to the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline.

But what does “world leading” oil spill response actually mean?

“I see a lot of gaps in this wording of ‘world class’ response,” says Riki Ott, a marine toxicologist who was working as a commercial fisher in Cordova, Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in March 1989, spilling more than 41 million litres of oil into Prince William Sound.

Ott says little has changed in terms of oil spill response in the past 28 years. She witnessed that first hand during the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.

“I set foot down in Louisiana 21 years after the Exxon Valdez and I’m watching the news and I’m seeing it’s the same booms, it’s the same burning, it’s the same dispersants that were used 21 years ago,” Ott said.  “I thought surely we had all learned lessons from the Exxon Valdez and that industry was going to be forced to improve its clean up methods based on lessons learned. Nope.”

The fact is there is no proven way to clean up a large oil spill in water.

Transport Canada expects only 10 to 15 per cent of a marine oil spill to be recovered from open water. That’s about as good as it gets.

But it gets a whole lot worse, especially when you’re dealing with diluted bitumen, or dilbit, from the oilsands — which nobody actually has a clue how to clean up, because it sinks.

“There is no known clean-up response for dilbit,” Ott told DeSmog Canada. “All of our so-called cleanup equipment deals with floating oil: the booms, the dispersants, the skimmers. You could have all the floating boom and skimmers available, but this stuff is going to sink so it’s not going to be effective.”

Diluted bitumen is comprised of the “worst parts of crude oil,” Ott says.

It has both the persistent, concentrated heavy hydrocarbons that end up on beaches or the ocean floor and don’t readily evaporate or dissolve.  But it also has the volatile organic compounds, which are a hazard for spill responders, nearby public and wildlife.

“I would not want to see an Exxon Valdez- or a BP Deepwater Horizon-sized oil spill in British Columbia,” Ott said. “You’re not ready for it. You’re just not.”

Ott said Alaskans made a lot of assumptions going into the Exxon Valdez spill.

“You trust the government has these standards in place, that the government is ready, that you’re going to be taken care of if there is a spill,” she said.

“Instead what we found was that promises sound really good when the industry and the government want something and it all becomes kind of like smoke after the ink is dry on the permits.”

Nearly 28 years later, the herring fishery in Prince William Sound has never recovered. One pod of orcas has never reproduced since.

“Things just collapsed,” Ott said. “What comes back is not quite the same. It’s like Humpty Dumpty. It’s not put together quite the same way any more.”

About a third of the fishing community had to leave town because they couldn’t make ends meet. It took 10 years for the salmon to recover.

The stress led to spikes in domestic violence, substance abuse and suicide — all documented in Ott’s book Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Spill.

“The state wasn’t there for us, the federal government wasn’t there, certainly Exxon wasn’t there. And it took 20 years before the litigation ended even for our most basic fishing claims,” Ott said. “This is what communities need to be ready for.”

Ott says there are plenty of red flags about B.C.’s ability to respond to an oil spill.

“You’ve already had a couple wake-up calls: you had the Marathassa oil spill right in English Bay … and it got away. And then you had Bella Bella much more recently … and it still got away.”

In the Bella Bella instance, a fuel barge tug ran aground, leaking an estimated 227,000 litres of diesel fuel. Oil spill response efforts were repeatedly hampered by poor water, failed spill containment and even an incident where a spill response ship took on water and itself began to sink. Meantime, the Heiltsuk’s shellfish harvesting areas were devastated.

“B.C. does not have world-class response. We’ve already seen that. It’s already been demonstrated,” Ott said. “It’s all shouldered off onto the communities that live near the shores where this stuff happens.”

“My hope as your neighbor across the border is that people really wake up and realize that the government has promised nothing.”

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British Columbians must learn from mistakes made following the Exxon Valdez and BP Deepwater Horizon oil spills and prepare oil spill community response plans, renowned U.S. marine toxicologist Riki Ott is warning.

Transport Canada, along with the industry-funded Western Canada Marine Response Corporation and the Canadian Coast Guard are in charge of oil spill response on the west coast, but recent incidents like the bunker fuel leak in English Bay show a lack of communication and spotty response can leave local governments and communities on the sidelines.

Speaking at a community workshop in Victoria organized by Georgia Strait Alliance and Living Oceans Society, Ott said the risk of an oil spill off the B.C. coast increases as more tankers and other vessels ply the crowded waters. Communities must be ready to deal with a disaster, she said.

“Oil doesn’t spill on federal and provincial land. It spills in someone’s backyard,” Ott said, warning that people also need to be educated about health hazards that come from breathing oil-laden air, diseases suffered by clean-up crews absorbing toxic chemicals through their skin and the decades-long effects on marine species and wildlife, ranging from mutations to extirpation.

“When it happens, it’s really too late. You have to put all your energy into prevention and it’s really important to have a plan,” she said.

Pipeline company Kinder Morgan has refused to release its full oil spill response plans for the Trans Mountain pipeline in Canada — even though those same plans are publicly available in the U.S. — meaning local communities and emergency responders have little to no information on how to clean up in the event of another oil spill.

An oil spill will disrupt communities and the environment long after the official cleanup is finished, said Ott, pointing to continuing problems in Prince William Sound, where the Exxon Valdez spill occurred in 1989.

“Oil on the beaches just doesn’t go away, it just goes under and every time the tide comes in, it lifts it up so the poison is rippling through the ecosystem,” she said.

Ott, a scientist, author and activist who witnessed the ecological destruction and social chaos after the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and then worked in the Gulf of Mexico following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, shone a spotlight on the resulting chemical illnesses.

Those go far beyond the flu-like symptoms, colloquially known as the “Valdez crud,” and include central nervous system damage, reproductive problems, cancer and liver failure, said Ott, who spent years researching health implications of exposure to heavy crude oil.

In the Gulf of Mexico the situation was made worse by the use of nearly two million gallons of toxic dispersants — used as solvents to break up oil slicks — which make it easier for toxins to be absorbed through the skin, Ott discovered.

“Oil and solvent is worse than oil alone and so much was sprayed it amounted to the sixth largest petro-chemical spill in the U.S,” she said, describing the area around the Gulf of Mexico as a toxic chemical gumbo where it became common to see dead dolphins, fish or shrimp born with no eyes or crabs with dissolving shells.

The lack of human health studies was startling and authorities seemed unaware that the toxic mix was airborne, said Ott, who wants Canadians to arm themselves with information because in February the federal government passed Bill C-22, which allows for the use of the same dispersant — Corexit — in Canada.

It is an alarming decision, especially as efforts are now underway to have the dispersant banned in the U.S., Ott said.

In 2011, the U.S Environmental Protection Agency issued a directive requiring BP to identify a less toxic alternative to dispersants, acknowledging that the chemicals can be carcinogenic and mutagenic.

Incidents such as the ruptured Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline that spewed crude oil over a Burnaby neighbourhood and into the Burrard Inlet in 2007 and this year’s spill of 2,700 litres of bunker fuel into English Bay underline the lack of local planning and minimal information about health risks, Ott said.

Response to the English Bay spill was frustrated by the federal government’s decision to shutter the Kitsilano Coast Guard base, something B.C. Premier Christy Clark, Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and the newly elected federal Liberal government have vowed to reverse.

Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau promised to reopen the base as well as reinvest in marine safety and oil spill response capacity in B.C. during the election campaign.

People need to know what products would be used after a spill, who gets to make that decision, where the waste will go, who will be responsible for cleaning oiled wildlife and who will be responsible for collecting carcasses, Ott said.

Canadian plans are based on the “polluter pays” principle, but that can cause problems, she added.

“Do you want the spiller in charge? … You don’t want industry making these calls, you want local government making these calls.”

A recent Georgia Strait Alliance report, “A Voice for Coastal Communities in Marine Oil Spill Preparedness,” echoes those concerns and is calling for the federal government to clarify roles and responsibilities, with an emphasis on ensuring local governments take part in risk assessment, planning and training.

The report also recommends formation of a citizens’ advisory council and additional federal funding to support local governments in preparing oil spill response plans.

“Boaters, beachgoers or local emergency services are often among the first to discover a spill and it is communities that are left with the consequences long after the response teams have gone home,” says the report.

“Yet, when it comes to marine oil spill planning and response in Canada, those who are most directly affected and have the most to lose — coastal residents and the local governments representing them — have ended up on the sidelines.”

The province is preparing plans to create a quicker, more coordinated response to land-based spills, which should be in place by early 2017, and it will also have a marine component, which should address many concerns raised at the workshop, said Graham Knox, director of B.C.’s Environmental Emergency Program.

Image: bunker fuel found on Second Beach by marine scientists Peter Ross of the Vancouver Aquarium

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