It’s the busiest port in Canada, and just a few minutes away from all the assets that assorted responders have stored, supposedly ready and waiting to respond quickly and comprehensively to spills.
The one downside is that there are several hundred thousand anxious voters with front-row seats from which to watch the response.
But when the effort comes up short, as it did this week, even that might turn into a plus. The high-visibility falldown has created enough furor that there’s a chance the badly needed upgrades to the response system will be accelerated.
It’s going to take a big argument first, though. Premier Christy Clark and Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson were happy to start it on Friday. They lined up to trash the federal government for how the coast guard oversaw the handling of the leak of about 2,800 litres of heavy oil from a brand-new grain ship anchored smack in the middle of the city’s gorgeous marine viewscape.
The two key issues are the six hours it took to get a boom around the leaking ship, and the 12 hours or more it took to notify the city of Vancouver. It will take some further explanation to confirm the initial impression of the response time.
But it sounds awfully laggard, considering how convenient the spill was to the responders.
The lag in notifying the city is completely inexplicable, to the point where the coast guard didn’t even try to justify it in its first briefing.
It was enough to set Robertson off. He demanded far better co-ordination among all the outfits and rapped the lack of connection at the federal level. His early verdict on the six hours to get the boom in place and the half-day to notify his city was: “Not good enough.”
He also took a swipe at the province. Sixty hours after the spill was reported, Robertson said the city was still “waiting for word from the province and the federal government … as to the next steps on the cleanup. They are responsible for this and at this point we don’t have any further guidance on our next steps.”
Clark opened her appearance by calling for time to acknowledge the cleanup, “before the finger-pointing inevitably begins.”
Then she started the finger-pointing. “There’s nowhere on the West Coast better protected, that has more assets in place, and they couldn’t get them there for six hours.”
She said the coast guard had a shortage of good judgment and advocated for B.C. taking over lead responsibility for spills from Ottawa.
“We’re going to have to come up with a better way of doing this and if that means relieving the coast guard of the lead,” she said. “Perhaps that’s a better way to do it.
“If we got the chance to lead here … I think we would certainly do a better job.”
Two years ago, Clark got national attention by declaring spill-response capabilities on the West Coast inadequate.
“The federal government needs to really improve the resources for the coast guard on our coast if we’re going to protect it from any spills,” she told the CBC. “If a spill should happen, British Columbia is not ready.”
That was in the context of the debate about oil pipelines, which is very much in the background of the debate about the English Bay spill. Officials say most of the spill was cleaned up by Friday. But the lingering unhappiness about the initial response shows no one is ever satisfied after a spill, no matter how good the response.
NDP Leader John Horgan doubted if much work has gone into Clark’s idea of taking lead responsibility and questioned why she didn’t phone Prime Minister Stephen Harper to demand better.
Just So You Know: In theory, the federal government co-ordinates a team of various entities which responds to spills. Clark revealed one absurdity in what happens in real life. She said the coast guard notified various outfits on a list, but skipped the city of Vancouver.
The Squamish Indian Band learned about the spill before the city did, she said.
