We heat and light our home with electricity. It's extremely affordable as we live in a rain forest, so water isn't a big issue for us. Many people in our town use natural gas in their homes. There is a proposed Natural Gas line that might come into our area; a little scary as there have been gas line explosions but if the Natural Gas was to spill, it would evaporate into the air. Oil, on the other hand, would sink to the bottom and would be almost impossible to clean up. We had a couple of good speakers come up from the Kalamazoo area to give us a warning of how Enbridge has abandoned them and the clean up is probably never going to be completed. We also had a woman that lives near the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and she brought with her, a container of soil that was recently collected and the smell of oil was extremely strong, even after all these years.
The pipeline company Enbridge wants to pipe in bitumen and condensate and then ship these raw products to the Far East in VLCC's (very large crude carriers). These enormous super tankers are as long as 3 football fields. We have a long channel that these ships will have to manoeuvre around islands before reaching the outer coast. Many times we will have hurricane force winds and I can't figure out how this could be done over 200 times a year for decades without having an oil spill like the Exxon Valdez. We had a large passenger/car ferry that sank after hitting one of the islands in the same region. Ninety-nine people were saved (from a First Nations village that depends on the ocean) but two people were lost. The ferry is at the bottom of the ocean and will not be removed. My partner and I sea kayaked the BC coast for six months and this channel was one of the roughest ones we came across. I am hoping to share this information with as many people as possible so we can come up with greener solutions soon so we can stop destroying our coastal waters that many of us depend on. Thanks for listening to my rant! |