💥Tsehum Harbour Diesel Spill 💥

Another case where nobody is accountable

5 Feb 2020. Earlier this week. A recent sunken boat in Tsehum Harbour diesel spill on southern Vancouver Island. Estimate of 200 liter diesel, 25% recovered, the rest floating around the other forty acres of marinas in the area.

Transport Canada at the time says not their problem…Coast Guard in ‘The Rock’ says ‘Oh no, under the control of the Receiver of Wrecks’. BC ER says not ours, call Coast Guard. Tsehum Harbour Authority says ‘ We notified Transport Canada’, don’t know what to do ourselves. WCMRC, not called. WTF?

Eventually some absorbent was laid out by the commercial diver to try mop up some of it before divers were asked to perform salvage in that diesel-brine. Nowhere near enough in the entire harbour! How can this sort of nonsense still happen? Who is really charge? Who isn’t doing their job? Or do we have too much government with insufficient accountability?

Maybe 40 gallons of diesel doesn’t warrant it…maybe we in the industry should all pack it in and become politicians…loads of talk and nothing else.

This spill could have been contained within minutes if the right equipment had been available. Tsehum Harbour Authority was too ignorant to see diesel gushing out despite them watching this boat sink. But then the desire, the process and the training would need to be there.

How does one fix this? Here in Canada we are WAAAAAY behind the Europeans and the Americans where putting technology to work for us is concerned.

#environmentalprotectiontrailers #environmentalprotection #rapidresponse #oilspill

fredy

ESQUIMALT EXPERIENCES YET ANOTHER OIL SPILL THAT LASTS FOR MANY DAYS.

Rapid response, training and the right tools are key to efficient containment. Local authorities do little to get any training time for their staff.

This Esquimalt Oil Spill wasn’t the first time in that harbour. Sea boom is great for long term containment, eventual secondary containment, yet takes a huge amount of effort and time to deploy. We have used that very 500ft of BC Hazmat’s boom and know the effort involved…it is a dinosaur where rapid response is concerned.

There are better tools these days that can be deployed in a matter of minutes, let alone days as was the case here again. When minutes matter….

Shoutout to the Nucor Environmental guys to working efficiently against constraints. Municipalities and similar might do themselves a favor to retain companies who know and practice how to do this stuff…

#environmentalprotectiontrailers #environmentalprotection #rapidresponse #oilspill

Tag: rapid response