The Pacific Northwest Fishing Reports website is calling on anglers to boycott all communities, including Kitimat that haven’t taken an official stand opposing the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline.
The site run by someone called “Old Jake” covers DFO Region 6 and Region 7a “in an effort to give sport fishing enthusiasts more options when it comes to our wonderful sport.”
Its about page says:
What makes this website unique is that it is not run by professional fishing guides or anyone who profits directly from fishing, we are local sports fishing enthusiasts here simply because we love the sport. Why is this important to you? Because we don’t have to make a sale on our fishing reports.
The boycott notice was first posted by “Old Jake” on March 31, but only came to wider attention in the past weekend when the link was widely circulated among the angling and guiding community and by environmentalists on social media in northwest BC, some of it in reaction to the oil spill in Sundre, Alberta.
In the post, “Old Jake” says in the introduction:
[T]he deck is really stacked against our pristine lakes and rivers.
Support our boycott on all business in communities which are not willing to protect our environment in hopes of getting a financial handout from Enbridge. Let us send a clear message to communities who don’t respect our environment enough to protect it.
Please do not boycott small fishing businesses that reside outside of any community boundary, because they are as much a victim of those who support oil for greed.
The letter says, in part:
Greetings fellow sport fishing enthusiasts, I am writing this to all of you, all over the world because we desperately need your help on two major fronts, both could permanently extinguish fishing as we know it for our generation and that of our children’s and possibly much longer.
The first and foremost problem is the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project which the Prime Minister of Canada appears to be declaring a project that will go ahead regardless of the National Energy Board Hearings.
The second is Fish Farming, and its unregulated ability to hide scientific facts, its attacks on free speech and attempts to silence those who dare to speak out against them.
First Nations have done their part, they stood up and spoke, all against Enbridge and Alberta’s need to cash in on the horrific oil sands that are killing the Athabasca River, and sending this toxic mess into the Arctic Ocean….
Here is where we have a problem, the cities, towns and villages appear to want it both ways, they want your tourist dollar, and they also any dirty Oil Dollar they can get as well.
We need you; the people of the world to write to the majors of each community and ask them why tourists could come to a community that won’t protect its natural resources. Why should tourists come and spend their money if the leaders of these communities don’t take a stand in protecting our lakes and rivers from the worst threat ever in the history of British Columbia.
Ask these majors (sic probably means mayors) how many people will come to visit if we end up with a mess like they did on the Kalamazoo River.
Here is the list, where the author equates opposing Enbridge with supporting the environment
Prince Rupert – Supports our Environment (Visit this great community)
Terrace – Supports our Environment (Visit this great community)
Kitimat – Does not support our environment. (Boycott)
Kitwanga – Supports our Environment (Visit this great community)
Hazelton – Does not support our environment. (Boycott)
Kispiox – Supports our Environment (Visit this great community)
Moricetown – Supports our Environment (Visit this great community)
Smithers – Supports our Environment (Visit this great community)
Telkwa – Does not support our environment. (Boycott)
Houston – Does not support our environment. (Boycott)
Granisle – Does not support our environment. (Boycott)
Burns Lake – Does not support our environment. (Boycott)
Fraser Lake – Does not support our environment. (Boycott)
Vanderhoof – Does not support our environment. (Boycott)
Prince George – Does not support our environment. (Boycott)
As the people near Sundre, Alberta deal with an oil spill of up to 175,000 litres into the Red Deer River, there have been reports on Twitter all day of Enbridge’s pro-pipeline ads appearing alongside stories on the oil spill on news sites across Canada. For most of Saturday, I didn’t see any Enbridge ads on the news pages I checked. Ad viewing is usually tied by algorithms to the specific viewer’s interests.
Tonight, an Enbridge ad did show up on my computer screen. An unfortunate pairing of a CP story on Ipolitics.ca that drinking water will be trucked into the affected communities. Alongside it the animated Enbridge ad promoting the Northern Gateway.
Water supply is a critical issue in the Enbridge debate, especially in Kitimat, BC, where the pipeline will cross the Kitimat River watershed and then follow the route of the Kitimat River to the planned terminal at the town’s waterfront. The environmental group Douglas Channel Watch says its studies show that a major rockfall or landslide could cut Kitimat’s water supply for up to four years, meaning the town would have to survive on bottled water for years. Enbridge has said its studies and engineering will ensure the water supply is safe.
But it get’s worse. I had written this story and went back to the original Ipolitics.ca story to double check the facts and the URL The page had automatically refreshed and a new Enbridge ad appeared as a banner ad. In the right-hand box where the previous Enbridge had been a few moments before, there is now an advertisement promoting the safety of fracking.
Advertisers want interested eyeballs and various cookies and tracking mechanisms mean that these days that ads appear either in a story that is tied to the industry, in this case, oil and gas, or tied to the viewers’ web history.
In all the years I worked in television news, there were always protocols for pulling suddenly and unexpectedly inappropriate ads from a local, network or cable newscast when there was “breaking news.”
It’s a lot harder to do that for a web ad, but it can be done. It may that with Enbridge spending millions of dollars on ads, management was reluctant to stop the campaign cold. But ads can e pulled. The fact the ads are running on the second day of the spill raises again the question of Enbridge’s managerial competence. After all, the American Petroleum Institute, the lobby group for the American energy industry, immediately stopped all pro-drilling ads within hours of realizing that the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico was a major incident.
(Note this site has no control over the Google ads which appear, which are even more than most ads, are tied to Google’s tracking of an individual’s viewing habits as well as the content of the story. Major banner ads, like Enbridge’s, however, are usually booked through web ad agencies and can be pulled by clicking a mouse.)
In the story, picked up from theVancouver Sun, Enbridge spokesman Paul Stanway was quoted:
“You are going to see a much higher visibility for Enbridge over the next few days. In newspapers, in television and online,” said Paul Stanway, manager of Northern Gateway communications for Enbridge. “It’s become quite apparent that the debate has become a province wide issue.”
Note, due to those algorithms, if you click on the original pages, you may or may not see the Enbridge ads, just I didn’t see the ones earlier today that were linked to from Twitter.
Northwest Coast Energy News is republishing this story on spills and other waste from the North Dakota shale oil and gas boom from the U.S. investigative site Pro Publica. Of most interest to readers here in northwest BC is ProPublica’s map of the spills in North Dakota, which is linked to in the story but not part of the republication package. You can find the map at this link or in the body of the story. That spill map, of course, could be a model for anyone tracking similar events in British Columbia.
North Dakota’s Oil Boom Brings Damage Along With Prosperity
by Nicholas Kusnetz, Special to ProPublica June 7, 2012
Oil drilling has sparked a frenzied prosperity in Jeff Keller’s formerly quiet corner of western North Dakota in recent years, bringing an infusion of jobs and reviving moribund local businesses.
But Keller, a natural resource manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, has seen a more ominous effect of the boom, too: Oil companies are spilling and dumping drilling waste onto the region’s land and into its waterways with increasing regularity.
Hydraulic fracturing 2014 the controversial process behind the spread of natural gas drilling 2014 is enabling oil companies to reach previously inaccessible reserves in North Dakota, triggering a turnaround not only in the state’s fortunes, but also in domestic energy production. North Dakota now ranks second behind only Texas in oil output nationwide.
The downside is waste 2014 lots of it. Companies produce millions of gallons of salty, chemical-infused wastewater, known as brine, as part of drilling and fracking each well. Drillers are supposed to inject this material thousands of feet underground into disposal wells, but some of it isn’t making it that far.
According to data obtained by ProPublica, oil companies in North Dakota reported more than 1,000 accidental releases of oil, drilling wastewater or other fluids in 2011, about as many as in the previous two years combined. Many more illicit releases went unreported, state regulators acknowledge, when companies dumped truckloads of toxic fluid along the road or drained waste pits illegally.
State officials say most of the releases are small. But in several cases, spills turned out to be far larger than initially thought, totaling millions of gallons. Releases of brine, which is often laced with carcinogenic chemicals and heavy metals, have wiped out aquatic life in streams and wetlands and sterilized farmland. The effects on land can last for years, or even decades.
Compounding such problems, state regulators have often been unable 2014 or unwilling 2014 to compel energy companies to clean up their mess, our reporting showed.
Under North Dakota regulations, the agencies that oversee drilling and water safety can sanction companies that dump or spill waste, but they seldom do: They have issued fewer than 50 disciplinary actions for all types of drilling violations, including spills, over the past three years.
Keller has filed several complaints with the state during this time span after observing trucks dumping wastewater and spotting evidence of a spill in a field near his home. He was rebuffed or ignored every time, he said.
“There’s no enforcement,” said Keller, 50, an avid outdoorsman who has spent his career managing Lake Sakakawea, a reservoir created by damming the Missouri River. “None.”
State officials say they rely on companies to clean up spills voluntarily, and that in most cases, they do. Mark Bohrer, who oversees spill reports for the Department of Mineral Resources, the agency that regulates drilling, said the number of spills is acceptable given the pace of drilling and that he sees little risk of long-term damage.
Kris Roberts, who responds to spills for the Health Department, which protects state waters, agreed, but acknowledged that the state does not have the manpower to prevent or respond to illegal dumping.
“It’s happening often enough that we see it as a significant problem,” he said. “What’s the solution? Catching them. What’s the problem? Catching them.”
Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, a lobbying group, said the industry is doing what it can to minimize spills and their impacts.
“You’re going to have spills when you have more activity,” he said. “I would think North Dakotans would say the industry is doing a good job.”
Still, advocates for landowners say they have seen little will, at either the state or federal level, to impose limits that could slow the pace of drilling.
“North Dakota’s political leadership is still in the mold where a lot of our oil and gas policy reflects a strong desire to have another oil boom,” said Mark Trechock, who headed the Dakota Resource Council, a landowner group that has pushed for stronger oversight, until his retirement this year. “Well, we got it now.”
Reaching ‘the Crazy Point’
Keller’s office in Williston is as good a spot as any to see the impacts of the oil boom.
The tiny prefab shack 2014 cluttered with mounted fish, piles of antlers and a wolf pelt Keller bought in Alaska 2014 is wedged between a levee that holds back Missouri River floodwaters and a new oil well, topped by a blazing gas flare. Just beyond the oil well sits an intersection where Keller estimates he saw an accident a week during one stretch last year due to increased traffic from drilling.
Keller describes the changes to his hometown in a voice just short of a yell, as if he’s competing with nearby engine noise. Local grocery stores can barely keep shelves stocked and the town movie theater is so crowded it seats people in the aisle, he said. The cost of housing has skyrocketed, with some apartments fetching rents similar to those in New York City.
“With the way it is now,” Keller said, “you’re getting to the crazy point.”
Oil companies are drilling upwards of 200 wells each month in northwestern North Dakota, an area roughly twice the size of New Jersey.
North Dakota is pumping more than 575,000 barrels of oil a day now, more than double what the state produced two years ago. Expanded drilling in the state has helped overall U.S. oil production grow for the first time in a quarter century, stoking hopes for greater energy independence.
It has also reinvigorated North Dakota’s once-stagnant economy. Unemployment sits at 3 percent. The activity has reversed a population decline that began in the mid-1980s, when the last oil boom went bust.
The growth has come at a cost, however. At a conference on oil field infrastructure in October, one executive noted that McKenzie County, which sits in the heart of the oil patch and had a population of 6,360 people in 2010, required nearly $200 million in road repairs.
The number of spill reports, which generally come from the oil companies themselves, nearly doubled from 2010 to 2011. Energy companies report their spills to the Department of Mineral Resources, which shares them with the Health Department. The two agencies work together to investigate incidents.
In December, a stack of reports a quarter-inch thick piled up on Kris Roberts’ desk. He received 34 new cases in the first week of that month alone.
“Is it a big issue?” he said. “Yes, it is.”
The Health Department has added three staffers to handle the influx and the Department of Mineral Resources is increasing its workforce by 30 percent, but Roberts acknowledges they can’t investigate every report.
Even with the new hires, the Department of Mineral Resources still has fewer field inspectors than agencies in other drilling states. Oklahoma, for example, which has comparable drilling activity, has 58 inspectors to North Dakota’s 19.
Of the 1,073 releases reported last year, about 60 percent involved oil and one-third spread brine. In about two-thirds of the cases, material was not contained to the accident site and leaked into the ground or waterways.
But the official data gives only a partial picture, Roberts said, missing an unknown number of unreported incidents.
“One, five, 10, 100? If it didn’t get reported, how do you count them?” he said.
He said truckers often dump their wastewater rather than wait in line at injection wells. The Department of Mineral Resources asks companies how much brine their wells produce and how much they dispose of as waste, but its inspectors don’t audit those numbers. Short of catching someone in the act, there’s no way to stop illegal dumping.
The state also has no real estimate for how much fluid spills out accidentally from tanks, pipes, trucks and other equipment. Companies are supposed to report spill volumes, but officials acknowledge the numbers are often inexact or flat-out wrong. In 40 cases last year, the company responsible didn’t know how much had spilled so it simply listed the volume of fluid as zero.
In one case last July, workers for Petro Harvester, a small, Texas-based oil company, noticed a swath of dead vegetation in a field near one of the company’s saltwater disposal lines. The company reported the spill the next day, estimating that 12,600 gallons of brine had leaked.
When state and county officials came to assess the damage, however, they found evidence of a much larger accident. The leak, which had gone undetected for days or weeks, had sterilized about 24 acres of land. Officials later estimated the spill to be at least 2 million gallons of brine, Roberts said, which would make it the largest ever in the state.
Yet state records still put the volume at 12,600 gallons and Roberts sees no reason to change it.
“It’s almost like rubbing salt in a raw wound,” Roberts said, criticizing efforts to tabulate a number as “bean counting.” Changing a report would not change reality, nor would it help anyone, he added. “If we try to go back and revisit the past over and over and over again, what’s it going to do? Nothing good.”
Nearly a year later, however, even weeds won’t grow in the area, said Darwin Peterson, who farms the land. While Petro Harvester has promised to compensate him for lost crops, Peterson said he hasn’t heard from the company in months and he doesn’t expect the land to be usable for years. “It’s pretty devastating,” he said.
Little Enforcement
The Department of Mineral Resources and the Health Department have the authority to sanction companies that spill or dump fluids, but they rarely do.
The Department of Mineral Resources has issued just 45 enforcement actions over the last three years. Spokeswoman Alison Ritter could not say how many of those were for spills or releases, as opposed to other drilling violations, or how many resulted in fines.
The agency has not yet penalized Petro Harvester for the July spill, thought it has issued a notice of violation and could impose a fine in the future, Roberts said, one of several spill-related enforcement actions the agency is considering.
Derrick Braaten, a Bismarck lawyer whose firm represents dozens of farmers and landowner groups, said his clients often get little support from regulators when oil companies damage their property.
State officials step in in the largest cases, he said, but let smaller ones slide. Landowners can sue, but most prefer to take whatever drillers offer rather than taking their chances in court.
“The oil company will say, that’s worth $400 an acre, so here’s $400 for ruining that acre,” Braaten said.
Daryl Peterson, a client of Braaten’s who is not related to Darwin Peterson, said a series of drilling waste releases stretching back 15 years have rendered several acres unusable of the 2,000 or so he farms. The state has not compelled the companies that caused the damage to repair it, he said. Peterson hasn’t wanted to spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars it would take to haul out the dirt and replace it, so the land lies fallow.
A spokeswoman for Statoil, which acquired Brigham, said the company stores only fresh water in open pits, not wastewater, and that “we can’t remember ever having responded in such a manner” to a report about a spill.
Federal officials can offer little relief.
Congress has largely delegated oversight of oil field spills to the states. EPA spokesman Richard Mylott said the agency investigates complaints about releases on federal lands, but refers complaints involving private property to state regulators.
The EPA handed the complaint about Brigham to an official with North Dakota’s Health Department, who said he had already spoken to the company.
“They said this was an isolated occurrence, this is not how they handle frac water and it would not happen again,” the official wrote to the EPA. “As far as we are concerned, this complaint is closed.”
As it cascaded down a hill and into Charbonneau Creek, which cuts through Monson’s pasture, the spill deposited metals and carcinogenic hydrocarbons in the soil. The toxic brew wiped out the creek’s fish, turtles and other life, reaching 15 miles downstream.
After suing Zenergy Inc., the oil company that owns the line, Monson reached a settlement that restricts what she can say about the incident.
“When this first happened, it pretty much consumed my life,” Monson said. “Now I don’t even want to think about it.”
The company has paid a $70,000 fine and committed to cleaning the site, but the case shows how difficult the cleanup can be. When brine leaks into the ground, the sodium binds to the soil, displacing other minerals and inhibiting plants’ ability to absorb nutrients and water. Short of replacing the soil, the best option is to try to speed the natural flushing of the system, which can take decades.
Zenergy has tried both. According to a Department of Mineral Resources report, the company has spent more than $3 million hauling away dirt and pumping out contaminated groundwater 2014 nearly 31 million gallons as of December 2010, the most recent data available.
But more than a dozen acres of Monson’s pasture remain fenced off and out of use. The cattle no longer drink from the creek, which was their main water source. Zenergy dug a well to replace it.
There’s little understanding of what long-term impacts hundreds of such releases could be having on western North Dakota’s land and water, said Micah Reuber.
Until last year, Reuber was the environmental contaminant specialist in North Dakota for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees wetlands and waterways.
Reuber quit after growing increasingly frustrated with the inadequate resources devoted to the position. Responding to oil field spills was supposed to be a small part of his job, but it came to consume all of his time.
“It didn’t seem like we were keeping pace with it at all,” he said. “It got to be demoralizing.”
Joanna Thamke, a groundwater specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Montana, started mapping contamination from drilling 20 years ago. She estimated it had spread through about 12 square miles of the aquifer, which is the only source of drinking water in the area. Over the years, brine had leaked through old well bores, buried waste pits and aging tanks and pipes.
In the Poplar study and others, Thamke has found that plumes of contaminated groundwater can take decades to dissipate and sometimes move to new areas.
“What we found is the plumes, after two decades, have not gone away,” she said. “They’ve spread out.”
North Dakota officials are quick to point out that oversight and regulations are stronger today than they were when drilling began in the area in the 1950s. One significant difference is that waste pits, where oil companies store and dispose of the rock and debris produced during drilling, are now lined with plastic to prevent leaching into the ground.
New rules, effective April 1, require drillers in North Dakota to divert liquid waste to tanks instead of pits. Until now, drillers could store the liquid in pits for up to a year before pumping it out in order to bury the solids on site. The rule would prevent a repeat of the spring of 2011, when record snowmelt and flooding caused dozens of pits to overflow their banks.
But Reuber worries that the industry and regulators are repeating past mistakes. Not long before he left the Fish and Wildlife Service, he found a set of old slides showing waste pits and spills from decades ago.
“They looked almost exactly like photos I had taken,” he said. “There’s a spill into a creek bottom in the Badlands and it was sitting there with no one cleaning it up and containing it. And yeah, I got a photo like that, too.”
Keller has grown so dispirited by the changes brought by the boom that he is considering retiring after 30 years with the Army Corps and moving away from Williston. He runs a side business in scrap metal that would supplement his pension.
Still, determined to protect the area, he keeps alerting regulators whenever he spots evidence that oil companies have dumped or spilled waste.
Last July, when he saw signs of a spill near his home, Keller notified the Health Department and sent pictures showing a trailof deadgrass to an acquaintance at the EPA regional office in Denver. The brown swath led from a well site into a creek.
EPA officials said they spoke with Keller, but did not follow up on the incident beyond that. The state never responded, Keller said. The site remained untested and was never cleaned up.
“There was no restoration work whatsoever,” Keller said.
A Department of Fisheries and Oceans report filed Wednesday, June 6, 2012, with Joint Review Panel says the department has identified streams on the Northern Gateway Pipeline route that Enbridge identified as “low risk” but which DFO considers “high risk.” However, in the filing, DFO says it can’t release a comprehensive list of the high risk streams, preferring instead to give two examples on the Kitimat River watershed.
The DFO report comes at a time when the Conservative government is about to pass Bill C-38, which will severely cut back DFO’s monitoring of the majority of streams. It appears that the anonymous DFO officials who wrote the report acknowledge that they may soon have much less monitoring power because the report says:
Under the current regulatory regime, DFO will ensure that prior to any regulatory approvals, the appropriate mitigation measures to protect fish and fish habitat will be based on the final risk assessment rating that will be determined by DFO.
Note the phrase “under the current regulatory regime.”
The report also identifies possible threats to humpback whales from tanker traffic.
In the report, DFO notes that Northern Gateway’s “risk management framework” is based on DFO’s own Habitat Risk Management Framework, and DFO, notes “the approach appears to be suitable for most pipeline crossings.”
However, DFO further remarks that it has identified
some examples where crossings of important anadromous fish habitat have received a lower risk rating using Northern Gateway’s framework than DFO would have assigned. In addition, DFO has identified some instances where the proposed crossing method could be reconsidered to better reflect the risk rating.
In bureaucratic language, the Department says “DFO reviews impacts to fish and fish habitat and proposed mitigation measures through the lens of its legislative and policy framework” again a strong hint that the legislative and policy framework is about to change.
It goes on to say:
The appropriate approach to managing risks to fish and fish habitat is based on the risk categorization. For example, where high risks are anticipated DFO may prefer that the Proponent use a method that avoids or reduces the risk such as directional drilling beneath a watercourse to install the pipeline. If low risks are anticipated other methods such as open-cut trenching across the watercourse may be appropriate.
While DFO is “generally satisfied” with Northern Gateway’s proposed approach, it says “DFO has identified some crossings where we may categorize the risk higher than Northern Gateway’s assessment.”
DFO then gives Enbridge the benefit of the doubt because:
Northern Gateway continues to refine the pipeline route and we anticipate that assessment of risk will be an iterative process and, if the project is approved and moves to the regulatory permitting phase, DFO will continue to work with Northern Gateway to determine the appropriate method and mitigation for each watercourse crossing. In DFO’s view, Northern Gateway’s approach is flexible enough to be updated if new information becomes available.
DFO then says it
has not conducted a complete review of all proposed crossings, we are unable to submit a comprehensive list as requested; however, this work will continue and, should the project be approved, our review will continue into the regulatory permitting phase. While there may be differences in opinion regarding the risk categorization for some proposed watercourse crossings, DFO will continue to work with Northern Gateway to determine the appropriate risk rating and level of mitigation required.
Here is where DFO points to current, not future policy, when it says:
DFO is of the view that the risk posed by the project to fish and fish habitat can be managed through appropriate mitigation and compensation measures. Under the current regulatory regime, DFO will ensure that prior to any regulatory approvals, the appropriate mitigation measures to protect fish and fish habitat will be based on the final risk assessment rating that will be determined by DFO.
The report then gives two examples of high risk streams both in the Kitimat River watershed
Example 1) Tributary to the Kitimat River, KP 1158.4 (Rev R), Site 1269
Northern Gateway Rating: RMF: Low Risk
DFO Rating: RMF: Medium to High Risk
Rationale: This is a coastal coho salmon spawning stream that is quite short in length. It has several historic culverts in poor repair which are already impacting the reported run of approximately 100 spawning salmon. Works can be completed in the dry as this stream dries up during the summer. DFO is of the opinion that the risk rating is higher than that proposed by Northern Gateway due to the sensitivity of incubating eggs and juveniles of coho salmon to sediment and the importance of riparian vegetation for this type of habitat.
Example 2) Tributary to the Kitimat River, KP 1111.795 (Rev R), Site 1207
Northern Gateway Rating: RMF: Medium Low Risk
DFO Rating: RMF: Medium to High Risk
Rationale: In DFO’s view the risk rating for this watercourse is higher than that proposed by Northern Gateway because this stream is high value off-river rearing habitat for juvenile salmon such as coho salmon. This type of fish habitat is vulnerable to effects of sedimentation and loss of riparian vegetation.
Humpback Whales
The Joint Review Panel also asked DFO for a comment on the status of the humpback whale, especially in the shipping area in the Confined Channel Assessment Area Between Wright Sound and Caamaño Sound.
DFO responds
Four areas of critical habitat were proposed for humpback whales in coastal British Columbia in the Draft Recovery Strategy released in 2010, including the Confined Channel Assessment Area from Wright Sound to Caamaño Sound. However, humpback whales have recently been re-assessed by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) and were redesignated ‘Special Concern’ but remain ‘Threatened’ under the Species at Risk Act (SARA). A draft recovery strategy for the humpback whale has been prepared.
It is unclear if humpback whales are still protected as a Schedule 1 status species under the SARA and whether a recovery strategy has been finalized.
District of Kitimat Council votes unanimously Apr. 2 to inform the Joint Review Panel about concerns about the town's water supply. (Robin Rowland/Northwest Coast Energy News)
District of Kitimat council voted on Monday, April 2, to ask the Northern Gateway Joint Review Panel to ensure that the town’s water supply is protected if the controversial pipeline is built. A second motion called on Enbridge to give the district a detailed and public presentation on its provisions to protect the water supply in the case of a pipeline breach along the Kitimat River.
That second motion was passed after a motion from Councillor Phil Germuth holding Enbridge responsible for any disruption to the water supply was defeated by a vote of 4-3. However, council’s new motion did not preclude Germuth asking Enbridge his original questions about liability.
The first motion called on the District of Kitimat to present a written position to the Joint Review Panel based on the district’s status as a government participant emphasizing the potential dangers to the water supply and noting that the mayor and council are “legally responsible to make every effort to ensure the city of Kitimat’s water supply is uninterrupted and of the highest quality.”
Councillor Phil Germuth (Robin Rowland/Northwest Coast Energy News)
After introducing the motion, Germuth said he believed the motion went along with council’s position to remain neutral because nothing in the motion took a position for or against the project.
Councillor Mario Feldhoff said he supported the motion without supporting all the details of Germuth’s full statement, a indication of the more intense debate to come over the second motion.
Mary Murphy also supported the motion, pointing to the potential problems of “transporting hydrocarbons” by both tanker and pipeline.
Councillor Corinne Scott said she would speak for the motion, agreeing that this was a request for information and not saying council was for or against the project, adding “we are all concerned about the potential of what could happen to our water supply.”
Feldhoff agreed that a letter to the JRP was not taking a position, adding, that on receipt of a letter the Joint Review Panel should take a very serious look at the issue of the water supply of Kitimat. Monaghan agreed but said if the council was to write the letter that it be accurate.
Feldhoff then proposed a friendly amendment calling on District staff to write a draft letter to the Joint Review Panel that council could then examine and agree to.
With the amendment, the motion passed unanimously.
Germuth’s second motion was more contentious, calling on Enbridge to provide detailed plans for ensuring the quality of water for the District of Kitimat and accepting “full liability” for the restoration of the Kitimat’s “entire water system” in case of a pipeline breach. Although some councilors had reservations about Germuth’s list of items, they agreed that Enbridge be called to meet council “face to face,” as Monaghan put it, by responding in person rather than by letter.
Enbridge had already responded to the motion from the previous meeting, calling on it to respond to the concerns raised by Douglas Channel Watch about the possibility of avalanche danger in the Nimbus Mountain area.
In an e-mail to council, Michele Perrett of Enbridge maintained that most of the issue had been addressed by Enbridge in either its original filing with the Joint Review Panel or by subsequent responses to information requests to the JRP, adding
Specifically we have filed geotechnical studies and responded to information requests that include information on avalanches, rock fall, glaciomarine clay slides, debris flows and avulsion in the Kitimat area and have reviewed information filed on this subject by intervenors.
The e-mail said that Drum Cavers, a geotechnical specialist would be making a presentation to council on Monday, April 16.
Monaghan noted that Douglas Channel Watch and other groups are limited by council policy to 10 minutes and that Murray Minchin had told council that to be fair, Enbridge’s response should also be limited to 10 minutes. Council agreed that the 10 minute limit is needed to make sure that council meetings finish on time and there was some discussion of allowing Enbridge to make a more lengthy presentation outside of a regular council meeting. That would allow Enbridge to not only respond to the earlier concerns about the Nimbus Mountain avalanche danger but also to the concerns about the town’s water supply.
Some members of council, led by Feldhoff, also expressed reservations about the seven points raised by Germuth; others wanted to possibly add their own concerns to any questions for Enbridge. Feldhoff was not prepared to vote for the original motion without more information.
Feldhoff then asked that the district administration prepare a report on the water supply, saying “I think the concerns may be somewhat overstated at the moment.” Councillor Rob Goffinet also called for a report from district staff on the “ramifications for our water supply,” adding that council should not “engage with Enbridge” until that report was ready.
Germuth’s motion, with all of the original questions, along with the invitation for Enbridge to make a public presentation, was then defeated by a vote of 4-3.
Councillor Scott then moved as part of the presentation that Enbridge was earlier invited to present that water issues be added to the list and that council draft a list of questions for the company, that could include Germuth’s original questions.
Germuth asked if the council could put a time limit on Enbridge’s response because the federal budget calls for limiting to the Joint Review Panel. Feldhoff responded that the new motion concerned council’s concerns just with Enbridge and that council should be respectful of Enbridge and hopefully the company could integrate those questions as well.
Goffinet said he wanted Enbridge to know all of the district’s concerns and so, in effect, this motion would get what Councillor Germuth wanted but by a different route, adding that if Cavers, Enbridge’s geotechnical expert, was unable to answer the question, Enbridge would be asked to return and answer the questions at a later date at a public meeting.
That motion passed unanimously.
Update:
Mary Murphy clarified her remarks in an e-mail by saying
I stated I had concerns with all hydro carbons transported along the river coastline…like CN Rail and transporting hydro carbons and the likelihood of a derailment etc, andhow that would also effect our waters. CN Rail is and has been transporting hydro carbons, etc for some time, and have had severe derailments.
The BBC, reporting from the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Salt Lake City, says Norwegian scientists are becoming concerned about dumping huge amounts of tailings in the country’s fjords.
Reporter Jonathan Amos in Scrutiny for Norwegian fjord rock disposal says for decades some Norwegian mining companies have been using pipes at 23 sites to dump tailings as far down as 200 metres in Norway’s deep fjords. Companies are seeking permits to do more dumping.
However, there have been no major scientific studies of the consequences of dumping tailings into the deep fjords. Now the Norwegian Institute for Ocean Research (Niva) is embarking on a three year study to look at the consequences of tailing dumping on the deep ocean bottom.
The BBC quotes Prof Andrew Sweetman, a research scientist with Niva as saying,
The mining companies send these tailings down a long pipe, down below the euphotic zone, below 200m, and essentially smother everything on the seafloor…
All the animals that live in the sediments that provide food for larger invertebrates and fish, for example, will be killed off.
Potentially, you are also going to kill off a lot of deep water corals.
And you can get extremely turbid water columns, and it can stay turbid for long periods of time. So, it’s a big deal”
Amos also quotes Lisa Levin, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, as saying that the Norwegian tailings story was a classic example of an activity being undertaken without fully understanding its consequences.
Northwest Coast Energy News will use selected testimony from the Joint Review hearings, where that testimony can easily turned into a web post. Testimony referring to documents, diagrams or photographs will usually not be posted if such references are required. Depending on workload, testimony may be posted sometime after it originally occurred. Posting will be on the sole editorial judgment of the editor.
By Murray Minchin
I’ve been here since I was about four years old. I’m 52-ish now so I’ve been here for 48 years. I’ve left for school, went to college. I would go travelling and then — but I always came back. Like the power of this place always drew me back.
I’ve hiked almost every mountain in the region and I’ve hiked the rivers and particularly the little tiny side creeks that run down the mountain sides here. And as you drive in there’s a little tiny creek that runs into the marina at Minette Bay.
So if you’re ever back, there’s a hint to you, there’s about 12 waterfalls on that little tiny inconsequential creek that nobody ever even thinks about. I suggest you take a walk up there because it’s incredibly beautiful. This area is loaded with places like that, that are singularly beautiful on a really small scale when you step back from the whole and you go into these little tiny spots. They’re just amazing.
I’ve sea kayaked quite a bit. My wife and I spent six months sea kayaking down the whole coast of British Columbia. We did two months in the winter, two months in the spring and fall and two months in the summer. So we did six months over the whole year.
It takes about two weeks when you’re out there for just the mess — the extra stuff in your head from our society and our way of life to just kind of drop away, and after about three weeks then you begin to open your eyes and you begin to feel comfortable in a place. Like you become essentially really comfortable in the environment.
When we got to Port Hardy we booked a motel room and walked in the motel room and we sat down on the floor and we started going through our gear and started talking.
It took about 15 minutes before we realized that there were chairs in the room and we could sit on them. Like we were just so in tune with being out in the bush and — like that really changes your perception of the world. You know, like you become a little more aware.
Now, like for me, when I walk into the forest here it’s like an embrace.
There’s — it’s a palpable feeling to me that I feel completely embraced and at home in this environment.
I dropped over in the Mount Madden or into the Skeena watershed into a cirque that was surrounded by waterfalls dropping into it. So I couldn’t hear anything but the waterfalls, and as I came around the lake I heard the sound of a grizzly bear just screaming his head off and I couldn’t tell where it was coming from because the sound was echoing off the rock walls.
You know, I had to hunker down under trees and then just stop and think,
okay, like take it easy, don’t do anything too fast, take your time, make the right
choice. Experiences like that sort of show you that you — our place in the environment isn’t as strong as we think we — as it is. Like the environment has a lot more drastic effect on us than we realize.
Oh, and it was a couple of decades later I was listening to the CBC radio and I heard that sound again, and evidently it was older mature cubs fighting over a kill, cause I recognized that sound right away. But when I was out there I didn’t know, I thought it was directed towards me, possibly.
My daughter was two or three years old when I began taking her into the forest. Just past here there’s the marina, and then if you take a trail past the marina, there’s a totem pole in the forest, and you take a walk past the totem pole, you follow this trail that goes along the shoreline. So she was on my hip and we were walking through the forest.
I walked off to the side and I picked a red huckleberry off the bush and then gave it to her, and she popped it in her mouth and then, like her eyes lit up and she started jumping, you know, because she started pointing and now I had to walk through the forest to every red huckleberry bush so that she could get a taste of the red huckleberries. Now that’s part of her life and that will be part of her oral history.
On part of that trip we had a couple experiences, — on our kayak trip we had some experiences- just trying to figure a way to frame this — like yesterday at Haisla we were saying that in particular with the whales, like they’re here but in the past there was a great number of them, you know.
On our kayak trip after leaving Bishop Bay we came out on to three sleeping humpback whales, which was an amazing experience for us. But as I understand now, in the past, there would have been a lot more. And I’m really — fills me with hope to hear that they’re coming back. And it’s some disconcerting to think that that could be jeopardized in any way.
Kanoona Falls. It’s just above Butedale. Like here water is everything. we got stuck there for four days in big storms near hurricane force storms and it was raining really hard. This river was in flood; it was up into the trees on either bank and it was running completely pure, like there was no sediment in it. There It wasn’t muddy. It was just a pure river running
wild. And this is what the Kitimat River must have looked like in the past, you know, running pure in flood and no sediment.
There’s so much rain here that in mid-channel — like a channel could be two or three miles wide and there’s so much rain coming off the mountains, through the rivers and streams into the ocean that the seagulls take freshwater baths at mid-channel. It makes me wonder, scientists being who they are, engineering being who they are, the Proponent trusting their advice, has made estimations on spill response and stuff with materials and saltwater.
In the winter here you’d have to go down a foot, probably, before you find saltwater and in fact we had the sea kayak 140 kilometres south from Kitimat before salted to encrust on our decks. That’s how much freshwater is out there.
So any of the Proponent’s estimations on spill response times in saltwater, which is denser of course, should be looked at or refigured because saltwater being denser would hold the product underneath the level of the freshwater on top.
Here it rains like crazy, just suggested by the moss that you can barely see in the contrasting photograph but the forest here filters the rain so that it enters
into the rivers and the rivers run clean and the salmon and the eulachon spawn in the clean river which brings the bears; the bears carry the fish into the forest, don’t eat all of the fish and then it feeds the forest when then filters the rains for the next — for the next salmon coming up.
It snows like crazy here, like I said, you guys are really lucky that you dodged one by coming here when you did. Like four-foot snowfalls are an amazing thing to you. You know, it’s not a snowfall it’s a force of nature.
If you catch a snowflake on your tongue, one of those snowflakes on your tongue you wait for it to melt, it doesn’t and you have to chew it; like they’re twice the size of a toonie, you know, and a quarter inch thick. It’s hard to imagine but it’s a force of nature when it’s snowing like that which brings concerns about access issues, obviously.
[There are] access issues, just daily access issues anywhere, particularly on to logging roads or access roads into the wilderness, there are going to be of a great concern and even more so in emergencies when equipment and materials have to be moved anywhere.
Another problem we have here in thinking about liquid petroleum product moving through this territory is the length of out winters. The average night time low is below freezing for five months of the year and for another one of those months it’s just one degree above freezing; so things can lock up and be under ice for months at a time.
If there is any slow leak — for lack of a better term — which we haven’t been able to iron out through the information request process, you know, a spill could go for weeks without being recognized, even if the weather is good enough to get a helicopter up to fly over the area. Things could be under the ice and invisible until it gets to Kitimat and somebody notices that there is a spill happening.
This is a sapling that is growing in an estuary and it tried, I mean it tried everything it had, it had branches ripped off, the prevailing winds and it struggled but eventually it just got pushed over and died because it was in the wrong place, which I think much like this proposal and this attempt to get tar sands, bitumen from Alberta to Asia and California is — it’s just in the wrong place.
So this, to me, this is in the wrong place and this is just the first such proposal that’s reached this level of inquiry or to reach the Joint Review Panel stage, it doesn’t necessarily make it the right one and that’s really important, especially considering how much — how many forces they’re being applied to use. Well, to buy different entities to approve this project.
It’s really important to remain cognisant of the fact that this is just the first
one; it doesn’t make it the right one.
Getting back to the environmental aspect of this; this is a nurse log. You can’t see it because of the contrast of the projector. But it’s a nurse log with little tiny seedlings of more hemlock trying to grow through it. The fungus is breaking down the log. And this natural system, if it’s allowed to play out, will recover.
If we give this place a chance to recover, it will; the cumulative effects of all the industry that’s been in here and the damage it’s done over time.
It’s shocking to think in 60 years you can kill a river. And that’s what’s happened here. We’ve almost done it. Like the salmon are hanging on because of the hatchery. The eulachon are almost gone.
If we give it a chance, it can recover. The humpback whales are coming back this far into the channel. Like we saw one in front of the — I don’t know if you’ve eaten at that — the restaurant here, but last year we were here and there was one feeding right outside on the beach, just off — about 100 feet off the beach.
So if we give it a chance, it will recover. And to threaten that in any way is — morally, for me, it’s just wrong. To risk so much for so little short term gain is not part of my mindset. I can’t comprehend that.
Like this spruce on Haida Gwaii; it’s on the Hecate Strait side of Haida Gwaii. You know, it’s in from the beach a little bit but, you know, with the 120 kilometre an hour, 100-whatever an hour kilometre an hour with northerly outflow winds we have around here, even a place like this would get spray from bitumen that’s coming in at high tide.
This is a tree that’s just barely hanging on, on Cape George. It’s on the southern end of Porcher Island with Hecate Strait in the background. And it’s just an example of what things have to do here when — to try and survive when the environment is so severe.
We paddled up into here on our sea kayaking trip, we came in at high tide and we were looking up at the rocks and then back into the distance and there was still nothing growing. It was just incredible to think.
So after we set up camp, I came around here and then took this photograph because where the water is, is high tide and beach logs are normally pushed up down the line along the shoreline, you know, nice and neatly tucked against the forest by the high tides.
these are just scattered all over the rocks, and that’s because the waves there are so big in the wintertime when the southeast storms come in that, I mean, like there’s nothing living for 10 feet up and, I don’t know, 70, 80 feet back because of the continual, every year storms coming in and pushing these logs and rolling them around.
Huckleberries, beach grasses, hemlock trees, anything will — if there’s any available space for something to grow, it’s going to grow. So this just speaks to the fact that the storms here are so continual and so severe that it’s a recipe for disaster.
You get waves crashing in on — so high onto a ship that the spray is getting down into the air ducts and down into the mechanics of the ship and then you’re adrift.
It’s a different — like after you — from travelling east, once you come into the Skeena Valley and you cross over that coast Range Mountains, everything is different. All your precepts from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, don’t matter here. There are severe environmental risks here beyond anything else in Canada.
I mean, the mountains are so young. The seismicity of the area is the area is questionable because there hasn’t been that much accumulated evidence over time. So it’s just something to be aware of.
It’s a place called Cape George on Porcher Island, which is just above Kitkatla.
There is Cape George, and this is just a storm that happened to miss us, but we were stormbound there for about four days.
I ask of you that you really consider that responsibility. You know, obviously you do, but it’s important for us to know that you, that you take that responsibility really seriously because like the — in t he Federal Environmental Assessment Review Office Reference Guide, as a guide to determining whether a project is likely to cause a significant environmental effect or not, it’s quoted as saying:
The Act is clear that the project may be allowed to proceed if any likely significant adverse environmental effects can be justified in the circumstances.
So what possible circumstances are there to risk such a place and to risk so many First Nations cultures?
So what I was saying was if you give nature a chance to heal, it will heal itself, and that’s what’s happening here and that’s what the Haisla elders were telling us yesterday, that this place wants to heal itself and it can if we give it a chance.
You know, to add more risk to the cumulative damage that’s already been done here, I think, would be essentially a crime. It should be given a chance to heal.
Another thing that Mr. Ellis Ross said yesterday was, you know, much like he’s making his own history, his oral history today and in his life, like you are as Panel Members making your own history as well and your ancestors are going to speak of what decision you made and the consequences of that decision.
British Columbia once had the richest, longest-lasting, sustainable oil economy on the planet.
That’s almost all gone now. While the environmental movement loves to quote Joni Mitchell’s “You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone,” the collapse of BC’s oil economy is perhaps the best example in history of what Mitchell meant in her song. Big Yellow Taxi.
British Columbia even supplied much-needed oil to Alberta.
The collapse of that oil economy is a cautionary tale for BC in the debate over the Northern Gateway pipeline. That’s because a pipeline breach near a key river or a tanker disaster on the BC coast would kill the last remnants of a commodity that made BC oil-rich for thousands of years.
The collapse of that oil economy is a lesson for Alberta and for the entire world.
It should be a lesson for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Natural Resources minister Joe Oliver and Environment minister Peter Kent, but it’s one that they will ignore.
The collapse of that oil economy is a lesson that should be taught ( but isn’t) by the departments of economics, business and politics at oil-patch academic central, the University of Calgary, which trained Stephen Harper and produces those self-satisfied commentators who can’t see anything beyond the Rockies and their own pet economic theories.
The collapse of the BC oil economy is proof that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” much loved of conservative economists is actually a deathly hallow in the hands of all those who are too greedy to care or who don’t bother to see what is actually in front of their blinkered eyes.
Much of the testimony at the Northern Gateway Joint Review hearings at the Haisla Recreation Centre on Tuesday, January 10, 2012, was about that economic collapse. Much of the testimony in Terrace, at the Sportsplex, on Thursday, January 12, 2012, was about that economic collapse.
The national and international media that came to cover that story didn’t realize what they were hearing. Only a couple of stories mentioned the ancient oil economy in BC but just in passing. It is probable that the members of the Joint Review Panel didn’t understand either, but it may be by the end of the hearings, once the panel has heard the story over and over, they may begin to realize how important it is.
(That is one reason that all the testimony before the Joint Review Panel is important. It’s the old story of hitting the donkey over the head with the two by four. The conservatives in the government, in the universities and the media who say repeat testimony isn’t needed are wrong. Sometimes a story has to be told numerous times before the powers that be realize, hey this is important. )
This isn’t about petroleum.
Nor is it about salmon oil or whale oil.
It’s about a small, some say ugly (compared to the magnificent sockeye salmon), member of the smelt family, a very distant relative of the salmon, the oolichan.
(There are several spellings. Euclachon is the usual academic spelling. One rare spelling is “hooligan.” That’s the one that spell checks and auto corrects prefer. Oolichan is the preferred spelling on the northwest coast, and thus that is what this article will use).
It was trade in oolichan oil and oolichan grease that sustained that economy in what is now British Columbia for thousands of years before the coming of Europeans.
Poster celebrating the oolichan released by artist Roy Henry Vickers
Trade in oolichan oil and oolichan grease created the “grease trails,” the trading routes leading from coastal British Columbia throughout the province and across the Rockies into Alberta.
Drive many of the highways in northern British Columbia and, like other parts of North America, where highways follow “Indian trails,” you are likely driving on a grease trail.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the grease trails, the trade in oolichan oil and grease may have begun as early as 5,000 years ago. By 2,000 years ago, the First Nations of British Columbia had a vibrant trading culture, with goods exchanged throughout the province, south to what is now the United States and north to Alaska.
Just as trade and industry in the Old World prompted the creation of infrastructure, the oolichan trade blazed trails and lead to technological developments such as suspension bridges and improved canoes.
The culture of BC First Nations has been disrupted for the past two centuries by smallpox and other diseases, creation of the reserves, by government and church paternalism, by the assimilation of the Indian Act, by residential schools and general acculturation. Despite those horrendous challenges, the oolichan-based trade has, left a multi-millenial legacy of expertise in trade negotiations. That is one factor in the current debate over the Northern Gateway pipeline. Ignorance of history is why the oil-patch and the Harper government have underestimated the First Nations in the current controversy.
Rich fish of the Pacific
The oolichan’s scientific name is Thaleichthys pacificus, “rich fish of the Pacific,” with oil making up to 15 per cent of its body content. That was the source of the rich oil economy.
Another name for the oolichan is “candle fish,” because often a dried oolichan was used as a candle by early European settlers.
The Gitxsan First Nation, now embroiled in a dispute after one chief signed a deal with Enbridge, traditionally called the oolichan the “fish for curing humanity.”
Oolichan grease/oil is rich in omega and other oils now in demand around the world. It is likely that the oolichan grease/oil countered the tendency to depression and Seasonal Affective Disorder caused by the rainy, overcast climate of coastal British Columbia, since omega oils are now recommended as anti-depressant.
Oolichan (James Crippen photo via Wikipedia Commons)
Properly managed, renewable in a way whale oil could never be, the oolichan could have been a multi-billion dollar industry, providing wealth to First Nations and export dollars for all of modern British Columbia.
It never happened.
When the Europeans arrived in British Columbia, they ignored the knowledge of the First Nations, ignored the oolichan. First the economic attraction was the sea otter, then it was the forests and the salmon, and then mining and hydro-electric developments. All the time the oolichan was out of sight and out of mind and becoming collateral damage of other industrial development.
The Kitimat River was one of the richest sources of that rich oolichan oil resource.
Samuel Robinson
Haisla Chief Samuel Robinson, who is 78, told the Joint Review Panel: “We used to fish… for oolichans which is now no more because of pollution in the river for the last 30 years. But the river is not dead yet. The salmon still go up there; that’s why we have to protect it. I know we can’t do much about the oohlicans now, but the salmon still go up there.
“Up the river, we spend our days there, harvesting oohlicans. In my childhood days, you didn’t need a net, you didn’t need hook, and you didn’t need anything. You can pick the oohlicans out of the water. In fact you could walk across to the other side. That’s how plentiful it was when we were thriving. [Now] No more oolichans.”
The oolichan stocks across northwestern North America have been declining for a century. No one, except First Nations knew or cared about this valuable, ugly little fish. Thirty years ago the pace of decline increased with the industrial development in the years following the Second World War. By the new millennium, the oolichan population was crashing from Oregon to north of Kitimat. The only viable stocks left are in the Nass and Skeena Rivers and those stocks are in trouble.
Endangered species
The oolichan in the Fraser River had completely collapsed by 2003. There was little, if any, media coverage. Compare that to the coverage of the collapse of the Fraser River sockeye run. Major headlines and now a Royal Commission investigating why.
In March, 2010, in California, Oregon and Washington, the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service declared the oolichan to be a threatened species.
In January, 2011, I was tipped by three independent informed sources that the Canada’s Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada would soon declare the oolichan north from the US border up to the Skeena and the Nass as an endangered species. At a meeting of non-aboriginal recreational fishing guides that same month that there were also worries expressed that climate change might be affecting the remaining viable oolichan stocks in the Skeena and the Nass. There is no recreational, tourist oolichan harvest, by tradition it belongs to First Nations. The guides had no direct economic stake in the oolichan, but those guides knew very well from experience that the oolichan is a key indicator species in the collapse of all fish stocks in the rivers that they love and which sustain their business.
This crisis was out of sight, out mind with most of British Columbia and ignored by the rest of Canada.
I was unable to get any interest in this “scoop” from any of the national news organizations among my freelance clients. (One admittedly budget strapped editor told me “we’ve done fish from BC.”) Compare that with the ongoing coverage for decades of the cod crisis on Canada’s east coast.
The day the decision came out, in May, 2011 the oolichan was just one of the several species mentioned in the national news round up of new threats to the environment. Here is what COSEWIC news release said:
The Eulachon or ‘candlefish’, so-called because of its exceptionally high oil content and historical use as a candle, was assessed for the first time at this meeting. This small fish was once a cultural mainstay of many First Nations groups of coastal BC and the origin of the famous ‘grease trails’ that linked coastal and inland communities. Since the early 1990s, many traditional fisheries for this species have seen catastrophic declines of 90% or more, and the species is facing extirpation in many rivers. The cause is unclear but may be related to reductions in marine survival associated with shifting environmental conditions, by-catch, directed fishing and predation. Only the Nass River still supports a fishery but even here numbers have declined. The Nass / Skeena Rivers population of Eulachon was assessed as Threatened. Further south, the Central Pacific Coast and the Fraser River populations have experienced even greater declines resulting in an Endangered designation for both populations.
In the national media, only the Mark Hume of The Globe and Mail looked closely at the oolichan collapse, much later, in a story on May 28,. 2011 How to bring back the Eulachon?
In his testimony, on Jan. 10, 2012. Haisla Chief Counsellor, Ellis Ross said: “I was too young to go up the Kitimat River before the oolichan was wiped out. I missed out in that teaching.
“Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of oolichans annually, these are the stories that are passed down to me now. It’s not about this is where you go to fish; this is where your fishing camp is. It’s about this is where it used to be. This is what we used to do… “
Haisla chief counsellor Ellis Ross testifies before the Joint Review Panel at Kitamaat Village, Jan. 10, 2012. (Robin Rowland/Northwest Coast Energy News)
Ross testified he has being going through the archives and records of the Haisla dealings with the federal and British Columbia governments. “All the assertion letters that council has sent out in the last 40 years in trying to determine what the Haisla Nation goal was. And it all had a common theme: protect the environment; bring back the environment. It always had that.”
He spoke of traditional knowledge and teaching. “Don’t disrupt the environment. Don’t spill any kerosene or gasoline into the river. Don’t litter in the river. Respect not only the oolichan and the river itself, respect your neighbours because once you are done with a fishing spot, you are going to process your oolichan and somebody else is going to move into that spot. So leave it the way you got it.
It’s a crime
“So as I was telling you, I missed out on all that, and it’s a crime. It’s an
absolute crime.
“The last story I got from the Kitimat River was my dad with Ray Green Sr. going up there after everybody else gave up on the Kitimat River. They tried to harvest oolichan so they could boil it into oolichan grease, but the end product smelled like effluent coming from the Eurocan Mill, so they thought it was just a product of the water itself. So they went inland a few hundred yards and dug a hole and tried to get the groundwater out of that and try to see if they could boil the oolichans using that. The result was the same.
“After that, there was no point because a run that estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands of tonnes annually got reduced to maybe 50 individual oohlicans per year. And I know that because we’re trying to struggle every year to find oolichan so we can test them for taint. If that’s not a signal to Kitimat, if not B.C. and not to Canada, something’s wrong. I don’t know what that is.
“If that was a commercially viable product, the whole country would have been up in arms demanding some sort of report and accountability from DFO. Nothing. We got nothing. Nobody came to our aid.
Ross told of the story of how the Haisla first came to the Kitimat region, how other First Nations were afraid of a giant monster that guarded the channel. When the Haisla reached the Kitimat River estuary it turned out the “monster” was, in fact, so many gulls that they appeared as one huge body when they took to wing.
“I can’t imagine that,” Ross testified. “If there’s thousands upon thousands of seagulls doing that at a distance of maybe greater than seven miles viewing it, imagine how much oolichan was in the river that those seagulls are feeding on.”
“The personal experience I have with the Kitimat River in 2003-2004 was going down to Vancouver to meet with the Minister of Environment. So we were trying to save what was left of the Kitimat River, we were trying to save what was left of the oolichans.
“So the pulp and paper mill couldn’t reach its intended targets in terms of effluent dumping and emissions so what was the provincial government’s solution; let’s amend the permit, let’s make it larger so they can reach their targets. They didn’t say anything about making the company reach those targets, fulfil its obligations, they just said let’s make the permit bigger.
“Well, we told the provincial government ‘If that happens, if you do that against our wishes we’re going to court’. The Minister at the time had the gall to put it back to us and say, ‘Okay, the company has already said that if they’re forced to abide by these permit conditions they most likely will have to close down. How will Haisla feel when you guys are the ones to blame for this pulp mill shutting down, how will you explain that to your people that working inside Eurocan’.
“And we said, ‘Go ahead and do it, I’m pretty sure for the six people out of 500 working in Eurocan mill we can find other opportunities for them’. Six people, and you look at every industry in Haisla territory over the years it was always started by Haisla people but they were slowly squeezed out for one reason or another.
Promises of jobs
“It’s all based on promises that we’ll come in, we’ll give you employment, we won’t affect the environment, we’ll listen to your wishes. Basically saying whatever they could to get their project approved and then guess what, less than 10 years later we find out that it was all a lie; they just said what they could just to get that permit, their certificate, whatever it was.
“I was born in 1965 and by the time I was old enough to start joining the fishing party to go up the Kitimat River by 1975 it was starting to decline. It didn’t take long; it didn’t take long at all. Salmon weren’t far behind it. There’s a reason why that state-of-the-art hatchery was built right beside the Kitimat River not long after. There’s a reason for just about everything that happened to Haisla in the last 60 years and it’s all directly linked to industrial development.
“So instead of getting taught how to fish for oohlicans, how to process oohlicans, how to boil for oohlicans, how to collect the right wood for burning for the oolichan pot, how to skim the grease, how to bottle it, no, I’m taught how the government issued permits that took it all away.”
In 2010, West Fraser shut the Eurocan mill, killed 500 jobs in Kitimat and walked away, leaving their mess in Kitimat for the current and future generations, aboriginal and non-aboriginal alike to deal with. That is the deathly hallow of the invisible hand.
On January 12, 2012 , in Terrace, Chief Counsellor Don Roberts, of the Kitsumkalum First Nation appeared before the Joint Review Panel. In wide ranging testimony Roberts also spoke about the his First Nation’s concerns about the oolichan:
“The oolichans are from the Bering Sea, that’s where they come from. The food chain that they’re feeding up there is not researched. We’re not up there. But they feed something — they probably feed that same fish that’s migrating in here.
“The oolichan then come across the north end of Haida Gwaii and enter the coastal rivers.
“About six weeks ago, I heard on CBC they were talking with the elders
over Haida Gwaii. The pod of killer whales that never went south, they’re wondering
why. But a pod, about 40, with a bunch of pups, what they’re doing is feeding on that herring. They’re feeding on the oolichan.
He described about how after leaving Haida Gwaii. the oolichan come out of Grenville Channel and enter the Skeena River.
“This is where the oolichan hang out…This is a hundred fathom area, and they hang off [this] drop-off there, 100 fathoms, and they start moving in there in November and they just hang around there. They come from the Hecate Strait.
“Right now, we are in January. They’re still down in here yet. Probably if you go down there you’ll start seeing the life activity around there because the fish got to hold out there until the eggs are ripe and they start getting used to the [reduced] salinity in the water. Because way out in the ocean there, it’s almost 100 percent salinity…they’ll hold out here all of February, then move in.”
(The oolichan are in a zone where the fresh water from the rivers reduces the salinity of the ocean. This is where the oolichan adjust before moving inland, up river)
“In Grenville Channel, there is clam and cockle digging is from mid-October to March. The clams and cockles food harvest is always eaten with oolichan grease.
“Again, we are showing the importance of oolichan. It’s used as a main part of our culture. It’s used in everything…we eat it with salmon berries, now we’re eating it with the seaweed back then and the clams; every dish.
Food chain
At the mouth of the Skeena, “all the Chinook salmon are all in there but they all migrate in there. Everything that hits the Skeena all comes in here. All these tributaries all feed in salmon. The oolichans come in these deep channels and they start feeding into the Skeena. All the cods and all the halibut, everything comes in there, everything.
“When the oohlicans come in you can go down there and the halibut are there. And if you go there they’re [the oolichan] not there, you’ve got to dig really hard to get a halibut this time of the year. And after the oohlicans make their run in then you go out there again and they’re there.
“There’s the the sea prunes. I don’t know what Canada calls it, but that’s what we call it. They grow all along form Chatham Sound to Hecate Strait. It’s a delicacy. You pick it, you steam it, you peel that black off, the cells, the spine, and you dip it in oolichan grease and soya sauce, and you’ve got a dish.”
Roberts showed a map to the Joint Review Panel. “This is the map that the government showed us where the pipeline is going to run — the steamships are going to run, Enbridge. Kitimat all the way up there, come down, propose to go down here or propose to go out here. But all this area I’ve been talking about, there’s a — there’s the Skeena River right there. They [the oil tankers] just run right by it.
“All the halibut grounds are out here, right around all out there, you’re running right over it. All the seaweed grounds are all right there, all the way down here for the other Bands. All the way down. Abalone, the sea cucumbers, and the oolichan come right through there, the head of the food chain.”
That is the danger that First Nations and others fear, the destruction of the northwestern food chain.
New poster
This weekend, the distinguished aboriginal artist, Roy Henry Vickers, originally from Kitkatla, near Hazelton, now based in Campbell River, a member of the Order of Canada and Order of British Columbia, recipient of the Queen’s Jubilee medal, whose work has been Canada’s gift to world leaders including Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, and can be seen at Vancouver International Airport, publicly issued a poster, free for reproduction: “Oolichan Oil, not Alberta Oil.”
Since the declaration that the oolichan are an endangered species, those of aware of the issue in British Columbia have waited to see if the government of Stephen Harper will do anything, anything at all, to restore the oolichan stocks. After all, oolichan sustained the oil economy of British Columbia for at least two millenia, probably more.
Harper has not only done absolutely nothing about the oolichan, his government is ordering even more drastic cuts to the staff and resources of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans along the British Columbia coast. (The BC government also has some responsibilities for the oolichan as well since they divide their time between the ocean, which is federal, and the rivers which, except for the salmon, are provincial jurisdiction. The BC Liberals haven’t done anything either.)
The reason there is no trust for the Harper government in northwestern British Columbia, even among many northwestern conservatives, is that northwestern British Columbia is ignored not only on the oolichan issue, but on halibut allocation, the export of raw logs, the possible danger of farmed Atlantic salmon in southern British Columbia to the wild stocks in the north, the cutbacks at DFO and the Coast Guard. It appears to many here that Stephen Harper is perfectly prepared to sacrifice northwestern British Columbia for the sole benefit of Alberta and the bitumen sands.
The decline of the forest industry, while on one hand devastating, at least for now, for the economy of British Columbia, is slowly beginning to restore some of the rivers to health.
Imagine if the rivers were fully restored, and the oolichan came back to the sustainable, harvestable, economic levels that drove the BC economy for up to 5,000 years.
Along with salmon, herring and halibut, an oolichan harvest would provide all of British Columbia, First Nations and the rest of the province, with many hundreds more on-going jobs than the miniscule handful of permanent jobs this province will get along the Northern Gateway Pipeline route. It’s an ideal hope, of course, but an oolichan harvest would provide jobs and support the economy without the dangers of a major pipeline breach killing the river or an inevitable tanker accident, caused by human error (as all major shipping accidents are caused by human error) destroying the coast.
It appears that the Harper government is absolutely determined to put all of the Canadian economy in to one oily basket, the bitumen sands, and is refusing to consider any alternatives, especially any sustainable alternatives with the “green” label.
The great distances in northwestern BC mean people have to drive. The world economy will be dependent on petroleum for the time being and efforts to find viable, economic alternatives are mostly half hearted and sometimes even blocked for ideological reasons.
So, one has to be pessimistic. Stephen Harper, Joe Oliver and Peter Kent have made it crystal clear that the Northern Gateway pipeline will go ahead, no matter what and likely no matter what the Joint Review Panel says. So far in the hearings not a day has gone by without at least one witness telling the panel they believe the hearings are rigged in favour of Enbridge and the Conservative government.
The lesson for Alberta and Stephen Harper from the collapse of BC’s rich oolichan oil economy is that short sighted, blinkered thinking will lead inevitably to disaster. One has to wonder if Alberta cares whether there will be any petroleum left seven generations or seventy generations from now for all the non-burning uses such as petrochemicals and plastics.
Unfortunately, in sacrifice to the petro-economy and the deathly hallows of the invisible hand, the oolichan may actually go extinct, rather than creating a new, viable, oil-based economy for British Columbia.
Sources
Drake, Allen and Lyle Wilson, Eulachon A fish to cure humanity Vancouver, Museum Note No. 32, UBC Museum of Anthropology
Henley, Thom River of Mist, Journey of Dreams Rediscovery International Foundation, 2009
Bish Cove, site of the KM LNG (Kitimat LNG) natural gas terminal, photographed on a stormy Sunday, Sept. 18, 2011. (Robin Rowland/Northwest Coast Energy News)
KM LNG (also known as Kitimat LNG) will consult with the Kitimat Rod and Gun club about creating a “legacy” fish and wildlife program at Bish Cove, according to the National Energy Board decision that granted an export licence for liquified natural gas to the partnership.
As part of its consideration of the social, economic and environmental aspects of the project, the NEB noted:
The Kitimat Rod and Gun Association requested that KM LNG and its partners establish a fish and wildlife “legacy” program for the area. In response, KM LNG committed to working with the Kitimat Rod and Gun Association to explore a partnership and stated it and its partners are committed to investing in the communities where KM LNG operates. KM LNG noted it already supported some community initiatives and would set aside funds to support others, after a positive investment decision.
KM LNG has hired the energy services company KBR to do a front end engineering and evaluation study of the project which is expected to be completed in December. The partners will then make the decision whether or not to go ahead with the project.
Mike Langegger of the Kitimat Rod and Gun, who made the presentation to the hearings in June, says the club has had some preliminary talks with the KM LNG public relations staff but so far there have been no formal talks about the legacy program.
In its presentation to the NEB, Kitimat Rod and Gun said it would ask KM LNG for a legacy fund that would be $7.25 million over the twenty-year period of the export licence. The money would be used to preserving fish, wildlife and habitat in the area around the natural gas terminal
Langegger says while it is uncertain if KM LNG will agree to the complete proposal, no matter what the outcome he wants all stake holders to be involved, with they are “consumers” (hunters and anglers) or “non-consumers” (naturalists) so that the habitat is maintained.
Salmon have extra large guts–up to three times larger than its body would suggest–that help it survive, scientists at the University of Washington say.
A news release from the university calls the large gut a “previously unrecognized survival tactic.” Although fishers who gut a salmon may say that no one noticed how big the gut actually was as they threw it away, the same apparently applied to scientists as the article states: “Despite …basic principle of quantitative evolutionary design, estimates of digestive load capacity ratios in wild animals are virtually non-existent.”
The study is by PhD student Jonathan “Jonny” Armstrong, originally from Ashland, Ore, who says he has been fascinated by salmon ever since he saw a Chinook leap out of the water when he was ten.
The study says that when the “foraging opportunities for animals are unpredictable, which should favour animals that maintain a capacity for food-processing that exceeds average levels of consumption (loads), The study that piscine [fish] predators typically maintain the physiological capacity to feed at daily rates two to three times higher than what they experience on average…”
“This much excess capacity suggests predator-prey encounters are far patchier – or random – than assumed in biology and that binge-feeding enables predators to survive despite regular periods of famine,” Armstrong said. Co-author and supervisor on the paper is Daniel Schindler, University of Washington professor of aquatic and fishery sciences.
“Guts are really expensive organs in terms of metabolism,” Armstrong said. For instance, maintaining a gut can require 30 to 40 per cent of the blood pumped by an animal’s heart.
Some animals have some capacity to grow or shrink their guts in response to changing conditions. For example, according to previous studies, the digestive organs of birds that are about to migrate expand so they can eat more and fatten up. This is followed by a period when their guts atrophy and then, freed of the baggage of heavy guts, the birds take off. But this study shows that many fish species maintain a huge gut, which enables them to capitalize on unpredictable pulses of food.
Ravens and crows, for example, are known to cache food far from where they find it. Fish can’t do that. “Unlike some other animals, fish can’t just hoard their food behind a rock in the stream and eat it later. They need to binge during the good times so that they can grow and build energy reserves to survive the bad times,” Armstrong says.
Armstrong is part of the university’s School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences which has a field site at the Alaska Salmon Program’s Lake Aleknagik. Using a dry suit, Armstrong snorkeled the Aleknagik tributaries, swimming in waters as low as 5°C where he found out the Aleknagik streams exhibited tremendous variation in water temperature, which inspired him to study how those temperatures affected the ecology of the streams.
In his initial studies, he looked at the effect of water temperature on juvenile coho’s ability to consume sockeye eggs. He says, “In cold streams, juvenile coho salmon were too small to fit the abundant sockeye eggs in their mouths. In warmer streams, the coho grew large enough to consume eggs, gorged themselves, and achieved rapid growth, and this suggested that small changes in temperature can have disproportionate affects on coho salmon production.”
The “previously unrecognized survival tactic” might apply to other top predators, such as wolves, lions and bears, Armstrong says.
