Wilderness volunteer holding two dead birds Photo credit: Ken Lay
IT MUST NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN
By Ross Smith and Elspeth Miller, Wilderness Committee members
"It's bad here, really bad. We can use all the help we can get." With that plea from the Friends of Clayoquot Sound in Tofino, we were on our way to help clean up the disastrous oil spill that hit Vancouver Island's west coast in early January.
When we arrived at the park warden's office at Long Beach, on Saturday, January 7, we were each handed a pair of heavy rubber gloves and a plastic painter's suit and directed to join other volunteers working on Wreck Beach at Florencia Bay.
Can't escape so why not change to an ecologically sustainable economy
Goodbye to the days when isolation guaranteed pristine wilderness. Environmental degradation is now omnipresent and relentless. Pollution dumps with every snow on the arctic; ozone thins over everyone.
Nowhere and no one escapes, not even the wild west coast of Vancouver Island where the largest ocean used to sweep the purest salt water onto the cleanest beaches in the world.
Turn to page two and read It must never happen again. Trace the inadequate government response in the Chronology on page three. Then sign, circulate and return the Official Petition on page four.
We must save ourselves from the current world war against the environment being waged by reckless and wasteful technology. Proposed offshore oil drilling on Canada's Pacific Coast is part of this war.
Your, our, everyone's personal commitment to fight for an ecologically sustainable way of life is the only answer.
Soon we, too, were filthy with oil - both the dark sticky oil that coated the logging debris and the sand-encrusted oil that lay in great blobs, pancakes and tarry pools between the beached logs.
The job was straightforward - get the oil blobs in plastic bags and when the bags were heavy, move them up as high as possible on the beach, away from the next high tide. We slogged away, digging and scooping with our hands, filling bag after bag. Twenty of us, all in spooky white plastic suits, worked non-stop for three hours, yet seemed to gain little ground, cleaning up less than 50 metres of that 5 kilometre beach!
WHO'S IN CHARGE?
As night fell, we drove north to Tofino. At the fire hall we were met by the din of many voices, crackling radiophones and a persistently ringing phone. This was the volunteer co-ordination centre, organized and run by local Tofino residents.
Here, information from fishermen, remote residents and clean-up volunteers was being monitored to give a true picture of the crisis. Volunteers were told where they could sleep and where they should work.
The Canadian coast guard and Parks Canada were also involved in the clean-up. The national parks department co-ordinated a very limited clean-up within the boundaries of the national park at Long Beach. Their bureaucracy, however, tended to hinder clean-up. Because Parks Canada, for example, would not bend their rules and allow trucks or backhoes onto park beaches, the privately contracted helicopters, which were desperately needed for the clean-up of more inaccessible areas, were used to transport garbage bags full of oil from beaches where ordinary vehicles would have sufficed.
Spray-Away and Burrard Clean, the clean-up firms hired by the company that caused the accident, became known as "the contractors". During our time there, we saw them concentrate their efforts on the high-profile, easily-accessible national park beaches and monopolize the helicopter time. As far as we were concerned, their staff, supposedly the experts, were disorganized and ill-equipped for the job.
Federal and provincial government ministers on tour also tied up helicopter time, one day actually preventing a volunteer crew working on a remote wilderness beach from getting any lunch. Worse still, the helicopter used to escort government officials was supposed to be collecting bagged oil. Because the oil wasn't collected, high waves at high tide swept the bags back out to sea.
All in all, there were only a couple of helicopters working when we could have used dozens. None of the official agencies seemed to be working together.
Second Day on The Clean Up
On our second day, we were sent out by the volunteer centre to a more remote area. We loaded into a small herring skiff and headed out over open ocean breakers and around perilous rocks to Open Bay on Vargas Island. Here we encountered smaller globs of much muckier oil. Filled with the fibre of seaweed and sea worm casings, the pieces of congeated oil resembled pancakes, concentrated along the most recent tide lines.
Here, on this lonely stretch of sand, we met our most grim view of the spill's damage. Tangled among the seaweed and the other oil debris were the tar-coated corpses of deep-diving seabirds. They were barely recognizable as life forms. It was hard to keep back our tears as we put their oiled bodies into the garbage bags.
Offshore drilling too risky
The recent west coast oil spill points out the lack of capacity to deal with oil on the high seas. Canadian coast guard clean-up equipment sat unused during the recent spill because, although it is the latest technology, it is useless except under "ideal" protected water conditions!
Both Chevron and Petro Canada hold Canadian oil leases - up to now undeveloped - in the waters off our west coast. Any day now Ottawa proposes to lift the moratorium on exploration and drilling. Then, because their leases will lapse if not explored, Ottawa will, in effect, be forcing the oil companies to develop their holdings. Consider that in California Chevron has been charged more than 1,000 times for offshore spills and pollution.
The proposed South Moresby Marine Park Reserve contains some of these leases. No one in the federal government has revealed any plans to cancel them to create the marine park or explained how South Moresby will be protected form oil spill damage if drilling is allowed.
After the recent oil spill we can better imagine the environmental devastation that an offshore drilling accident would cause. British Columbia has one of the stormiest coasts in the world. In addition, the Charlottes straddle two major earthquake faults. No one can give believable assurances that there will be no oil spills there if development goes ahead.
It is the position of the Wilderness Committee that, since there is no safe way to drill for oil off the B.C. coast today, the offshore exploration and drilling moratorium must continue.
Meeting Strachan on site
On our third day, frustrated by an aborted attempt to get a remote beach where clean up hadn't yet begun, we ended up on Wickaninnish Beach, which volunteers w ere cleaning for the fifth time in as many days. Each successive tide brought in more oil. Each clean-up prevented oil from being washed back to sea where it would sink and break down doing its terrible damage to bottom life.
Suddenly an unfamiliar Jet Ranger helicopter landed just up the beach from where we were working. A party of officials made their way down the beach. One offered his hand, saying "Hello, I'm Bruce Stracham and this is my deputy minister. We've walked along the beach and looking around here, I really can't see any oil."
We happened to be standing on a particularly good example of the problem - oil globs, covered by tide washed sand. Crouching down, we uncovered about a dozen large flat oil globs within a two metre radius of our meeting place, and heaped them together to form an oozing, fuming heap, Strachan registered some surprise.
He wanted to feel some oil so we handed him a glob and it stuck, despite his repeated attempts to grind it off with sand and assorted beach debris.
This was his first close look at the disaster area - Monday, the 9th of January, a week after the oil started washing ashore.
We told Strachan of the shortage of helicopters for cleaning remote beaches, the lack of garbage bags and tools, the contractors focus on the highly visible park beaches and the reasons why we were "doing our bit" to help.
When we put the mister o the spot he admitted, "Yes, it was more serious than he imagined and "yes" you really can't see anything by flying over the beaches.
Our exchange was polite and we felt that we had given the officials a clean message: do something immediately to assist. Strachan, undeterred by Ross' tarry globe, shook hands and left, undoubtedly carrying some thick oil home on his shiny shoes.
The Work Continues
BEWARE!
Oil spill on beach.
Check your feet
Working on Chesterman's Beach on our fourth day we felt, for the first time, truly efficient. The municipality of Tofino had a backhoe on the beach and volunteers were shoveling oil into the bucket which was then dumped directly into a dump truck and taken away for temporary storage. The globs of oil were smaller. By rigging a scraper out of several boards, we were able to clean up a lot beach very quickly.
The sun came out and the news media scramble about, interviewing volunteer workers for another story. All week the media had carried our please for more help to the outside work. We met the reporters everywhere, on the beaches during the day and over beers in the pub at night. They disaster - in contrast to the official cover-up, that everything was taken ca re of and under control.
Although our help was still desperately needed we had to leave to take care of our work-a-day lives. We left asking ourselves questions. What if it had been a much larger spill or an oil well blownout? Who's going to clean up a remote are like the central coast, where there is even poorer access and a smaller local population?
What about the total wilderness picture -are we going to have any unspoiled left in the future?
Map of Area of Fisheries Ban
