Dear Editor:
Why are some people in B.C. against the Kinder Morgan pipeline? Please look up Kinder Morgan Oil Spill History on Google. There have been 80 recorded spills since 1961, six in Jasper National Park.
Spill history isn’t encouraging if we want to preserve our coastline from tarry bitumen pollution.
Indigenous rights are being ignored, and the geology of the coastal region is not being taken into account. It’s in an earthquake subduction zone.
B.C. seismologist, Johanna Wagstaff, said that it isn’t if we’ll get a big earthquake on our coast, it’s when.
Coastal Alaska had a 9.2 earthquake in 1964. A modern large part of Anchorage fell into the sea, and only roof peaks were visible.
Coastal Valdez was partly wrecked and was moved. In places the ground had either heaved upwards or dropped eight metres.
For people who haven’t experienced a damaging earthquake, it’s probably difficult to imagine the extreme forces involved.
I saw the damage in Alaska and experienced earthquake power firsthand in Latin America.
A big earthquake could easily snap a pipeline just as simply as you can break a toothpick.
From Alberta to our coast, the pipeline would cross 1,309 water-courses in Alberta and B.C.
The pipeline would traverse the Vedder Fan aquifer and the municipality of Chilliwack’s protected groundwater zone, then cross the Fraser River to the Westridge Marine Terminal at Burrard Inlet for export on 400 super tankers a year passing through sometimes stormy waters.
This pipeline would also produce between 20 to 26 megatons of carbon pollution per year, wrecking our chances for fighting effectively against climate change.
Jobs? What about refining the bitumen in Alberta and taking out the vanadium that could be used for producing fuel cells in Canada?
Fuel cells are for storing grid energy from solar and wind power.
Instead of exporting finite raw oil, containing nickel, titanium and vanadium, we could be using those heavy metals, which must be removed anyway, for products in Canada.
It’s tiresome to hear quacking about jobs being destroyed by B.C. not wanting the pipeline going to our coast, through Burnaby, which has already experienced a big oil spill in the past.
Some people don’t seem to care what would happen to B.C.’s jobs if our coastal fishery and tourism were wrecked by tarry bitumen, a substance difficult to remove. Seventy per cent of Kinder Morgan’s shareholders are from the United States. Do they care about our coast?
Marilyn Hansen
Summerland