Bill Gannon, a public accountant who worked with Greenpeace in the 1970s, was spurred into action when he observed crude-oil tankers regularly sailing through Burrard Inlet.

Credit: Doug Shanks

NEWS: Oil tankers pose threat to Inlet

Former Greenpeace activist Bill Gannon, 61, looked out the window of his Coal Harbour office one day in March and was shocked to see an oil tanker sailing through Burrard Inlet. The vessel, unmistakably identifiable as a tanker due to its oblong shape and low height, inspired Gannon to drive out to the Burnaby offices of Kinder Morgan Canada, the international petroleum transportation company that controls oil transport in and out of the Inlet. “The communications person... called me back and said, ‘Yes, we’ve been doing these shipments for a few years now. There’s no problem, they’re safe. There’s nothing to worry about,’” he recalls.

But Gannon, who worked with Greenpeace during its formative Vancouver years in the mid-1970s and now works as an independent public accountant, was skeptical of Kinder Morgan’s claims of safe shipping.

Further research indicated that crude-oil tankers bound for China leave Burrard Inlet every week, each of them carrying 500,000 barrels of unrefined petroleum from Alberta. The tankers, Gannon found, go around Stanley Park and English Bay, into the Georgia Strait, and out to the Pacific Ocean. “I always thought they were just refining oil and then taking gasoline and other fuels up to the rest of the islands, servicing our coast. That’s fine; that’s been going on for a long time,” Gannon says. “But now there are these big crude-oil tankers... That’s 500,000 barrels, 21 million gallons of dirty crude oil that Obama doesn’t want.”

In the months following his first sighting of the tanker in Burrard Inlet, and informal discussions that indicated disturbingly low public awareness of their presence, Gannon set to work producing a comprehensive Burrard Inlet crude-oil risk-assessment report (available for download at BCWaters.org). Last week, he delivered it to Vancouver Centre MP Hedy Fry, Mayor Gregor Robertson, and Vancouver-West End MLA Spencer Herbert. He also delivered copies to the surrounding municipalities of Burnaby and North and West Vancouver. The report outlines the high risk of a crude-oil spill in the Inlet, which would have disastrous consequences for surrounding marine life, beaches, and coastlines.

Gannon has yet to hear back from politicians about their thoughts on the report, but he had previously been in touch with Fry, who told him last June that the federal Liberals passed a policy resolution to ban tanker traffic in B.C., while the federal Conservatives have no such plan.

In February of this year, Don Davies, NDP MP for Vancouver Kingsway, drafted a private members bill to reinforce an oil-tanker moratorium on B.C.’s coast. “There has been... an unofficial moratorium on tankers in sensitive waters up the coast, and what my act would do would enshrine that unofficial moratorium into law,” Davies told WE. “My research has indicated that the question is not if there will be a spill, but when.”

An oil spill in Burrard Inlet, Davies says, would create damage that would be almost impossible to undo. “This isn’t dropping a quart of oil overboard; this is something where there will be millions and millions of litres of sticky crude oil... You’ve got extremely dangerous and toxic materials, and impossible-to-clean-up stuff that is being ferried across the ocean to China without any real plan to mitigate against [it].”

Like Gannon’s experience with Kinder Morgan Canada, Davies says oil companies will “mouth easy platitudes” that don’t get to the heart of the matter. “I don’t think that oil transportation is a smart long-term activity. It’s an activity that is inherently dangerous. If you take the long environmental view, it’s an activity that we ought to start controlling and minimizing as much as we can. My bill would start with protecting ecologically sensitive areas now by banning [the activity] outright, and then we can look at gradually expanding that moratorium so that we protect more and more of our coastline.”

Davies would rather see B.C.’s coastlines used for eco-tourism instead of oil shipping, and he hopes proactive measures on banning oil tankers from the coast will help us avoid an event as catastrophic as the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which dumped 49 million litres of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska, the effects of which have never been fully mitigated. “I don’t think anybody can really clean it up, despite what the oil industry will tell you,” he says. “My suspicion is that we are woefully unprepared.”