Health and safety first

By Letter to the Editor on May 2, 2018.

With all the controversy about the Trans Mountain pipe line project and BC residents are worried about their pristine shore line. Across Boundary Bay the Cherry Point oil refinery at Ferndale, Wash., is about 25 kilometres away since 1971. It refines oil that has been brought down the west coast by tankers from Alaska and by pipelines, one from Canada. Since the 1970s it has increased capacity from 100,000 barrels per day. It now refines 234,000 barrels per day, making it the largest refinery in Washington.

Victoria should join the rest of North America and treat its sewage, rather than continue pushing the stuff into the ocean, raw and untreated. The debate has raged for decades. In the meantime, and for the foreseeable future, the region will continue to discharge an average of 82 million litres a day into the ocean that surrounds it.

Although most of Vancouver’s sewage goes to treatment plants, raw sewage frequently backs up into the stormwater system dumping 36 billion litres of untreated effluent from outfalls in Vancouver, Burnaby and New Westminster each year. That’s enough to fill B.C. Place stadium more than 28 times. The older parts of the sewage and stormwater system use one pipe that carries both sewage and stormwater combined.

On dry days, all of it goes to the sewage treatment plant. But stormwater overloads the system, backing up and discharging from 42 combined underwater outfalls, so the public never sees the raw sewage that harms marine life all around the outfalls.

The worst outfall empties into Burrard Inlet at the north end of Clark Drive. Because it is an industrial zone in the Port of Vancouver, most people are unaware of the huge volumes of raw sewage discharging regularly from this site, often on a continuous basis. A large area of the ocean floor is smothered by human feces, condoms, tampons and toilet paper. The plume from the outfall reaches as far as New Brighton Park. There are outfalls at Brockton Point, Coal Harbour, English Bay, Kitsilano and five in False Creek. More than a dozen go directly into the Fraser River, where billions of juvenile salmon spend months acclimatizing to the saltwater environment. The Greater Vancouver Regional District has set a 50-year timeline for eliminating these raw sewage discharges even though Fisheries and Oceans Canada considers them a violation of the Fisheries Act.

We all should obey all Act’s and comply with all safety regulations. All pipelines and railway’s need to be frequently inspected certified upgraded and maintained. To quote Warren Buffett, “rail tank cars need to be upgraded and trains slowed down to safely transport the surging production of volatile Bakken oil.”

There will be changes made, and there should be.

I don’t want Bakken oil transported by rail through our or any community in Canada.