Anyone who hoped to visit West Vancouver’s Stearman Beach this week might have been out of luck as a simulated oil spill hit the shores Wednesday.
The Western Canada Marine Response Corp. conducted exercises on Wednesday, designed to simulate an oil spill and test the company contractors and their response time, according to a press release issued last Wednesday.
“This is a shoreline flushing training exercise,” said Michael Lowry, the media relations officer at Western Canada Marine Response. “So what that means is that in the event of a spill and the oil reaches the beach, there’s certain methods we use to clean that up. We put a boom around the area and use a flushing kit on the beach
. . . flushing the oil back out into the water where it’s much easier to recover,” said Lowry.
Lowry said Stearman was chosen because there are three mooring points for tankers on the beach, and while no fueling barge has taken up the contract to refuel there, “there is permission to technically refuel, so we thought it would be a good location.”
Due to Environment Canada regulations, there was no product added to the exercise.
According to Lowry, the exercise went faster than the corporation had expected.
“The prime purpose for us in these exercises is to make sure that the spots (for equipment, access to the beach) we have identified actually work. Instead, the oil spill response team flushed seawater from the beach back to the inlet.
The training exercise is part of the company’s “mandate to maintain our state of readiness,” according to the press release. The response time standards posted by the group is deployment on scene within six hours for any spill under 150 tons, and within 12 hours for under 1,000 tons.
The company previously conducted a much larger exercise last September in Howe Sound, in which they deployed equipment to clean a simulated 2,500-tonne spill. The company plans to do a 1,000-tonne simulation in the fall of this year, according to Lowry.
The District of West Vancouver approved the exercises and had a bylaw officer at the proceedings.
While Western Canada Marine Response train in the event of a spill, an alliance of women activists, including representatives from local First Nations, plan to protest the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, which would travel through the Lower Mainland.
Groups involved include the Tsleil-Waututh Nation Sacred Trust, and Squamish and Musqueam nations, as well as Joanna Kerr, the executive director of Greenpeace Canada. The women will hold a banner saying “Wall of women opposing Kinder Morgan expansion,” according to Greenpeace Canada.
The groups will protest Saturday at Ambleside Beach.
