Just three months after a previous spill fouled North Vancouver’s Mackay Creek, oil from an unidentified source leached into the same creek Friday, potentially harming coho and trout.
A resident contacted district staff last Friday afternoon after spotting a patch of oil on the road and a “fluorescent sheen” on the surface of the creek, according to Richard Boase, the district’s section manager environmental sustainability operations.
Crews put a boom where the storm drain enters the creek and deployed a vactor truck, using pressurized water to flush out the storm sewer and sucking the oily water out of a downstream manhole.
Over five days, district crews took 56,000 litres of oily water out of the sewer. Once vacuumed out, district drivers trucked the loads on a “fairly long trip” to a plant that separates the oil from the water before disposing of the water and recycling the oil.
The water treatment plants charge about 50 cents a litre. Coupled with the cost of the vacuum truck, the cleanup likely cost the district about $40,000.
The spill doesn’t appear to have killed any fish in the creek. But that doesn’t mean the creek hasn’t been harmed or that dead fish haven’t been washed into Burrard Inlet, said Wildcoast Ecological Society representative Krystal Brennan.
“We are very much hoping that it hasn’t affected species like coho because they do spend an entire year rearing,” she said.
Boase said he suspects the source of the spill is an oil change shop’s waste oil tank in the area of Lloyd Avenue between 14th and 3rd streets.
The district is in the midst of what is “almost like a forensic investigation,” Boase said, adding the municipality conferred with City of North Vancouver staff before determining the fouled storm sewer was in the district.
“In an incident like this we’re not worrying about jurisdictional boundaries,” he said.
It can be a challenge to determine when the spill happened, Boase added, because oil can stick in a storm sewer until a torrent of water dislodges oil that’s been stuck in a pipe or caught on the side of the road.
The previous oil spill into Mackay Creek, which happened in early November, remains unsolved. “We never did determine the source or even which storm outfall it was coming from,” Boase said. “Unfortunately, that’s also fairly common.”
The spill is “particularly frustrating,” Brennan said, because streamkeepers have put logs in the creek to offer smolts a hiding place from predators, planted vegetation on the creek’s banks and ripped out invasive species to build better habitat.
The restoration work has been successful in bringing salmon as well as nesting eagles back to the creek, Brennan said.
“This was very sad for us,” Brennan said, adding it’s a reminder to keep doing their work and educating the public that every drain leads to a stream or the ocean.
