The people of Hartley Bay feel a bit more uneasy today
Jack Knox, canwest news services
Published: Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Six metres of snow in Hartley Bay so far this winter.
Usually it snows, then melts, then rains in a pattern that repeats all season long, but this year it just kept snowing and snowing until it piled high above the raised boardwalks that take the place of roads in the tiny coastal settlement.
The snow lends to the sense of isolation of a village accessible only by boat or seaplane from Prince Rupert, 140 kilometres to the northwest. Yesterday's release of the Transportation Safety Board report into the sinking of the Queen of the North didn't exactly ease the feeling of vulnerability.
The report painted a grim picture: key navigation equipment turned off and too few bridge crew paying too little attention before the ferry hit the rocks off Gil Island and sank on March 22, 2006. Hardly reassuring to the 180 members of the Gitga'at band who call nearby Hartley Bay home, and who daily watch marine traffic parade through what they think of as God's grocery store -- the waters that provide the clams, cockles, mussels, salmon, seaweed and other goodies on which they base their diet.
The Gitga'at wonder when the next disaster will occur, whether another ship will sink, or whether the Queen of the North will suddenly give up the fuel that might, or might not, still be trapped on board, 430 metres below the surface.
"She's still sitting down there, still burping up oil," says Ernie Hill, the hereditary chief of the eagle clan, which in Gitga'at culture makes him steward of the land and water. He says a Hartley Bay man checks the wreck site every day during good weather, and can see the bubbles coming up and a diesel sheen on the surface.
Hill, who is also the principal of the Hartley Bay school, says he's a realist, that he doesn't think the sunken ferry can be raised. "But I think there should be an effort to extract whatever diesel is left in there."
Ain't going to happen, says the coast guard. Even if they could figure how much fuel, if any, is left on board -- the ferry's capacity was 220,000 litres of diesel and 20,000 litres of light oil -- it would be damn near impossible, not to mention dangerous, to suck it out of the sunken vessel. The ferry sank so fast, slamming into the bottom stern first, that its fuel tanks likely imploded from the pressure, meaning any remaining fuel could be distributed in hard-to-reach compartments throughout the ferry. All that the coast guard, B.C. Ferries and Environment Canada can safely do is monitor the site.
Cold comfort for the people of Hartley Bay. For the first time in two years, they have begun harvesting their main clam bed, which was fouled by the lake of diesel that spread after the sinking. The results have been disappointing, the clams small and their meat dark and mushy, Hill says.
That's not the only source of concern. About 40 kilometres up Grenville Channel from Hartley Bay, near a source of cockles, lies the underwater wreck of the Brigadier General M.G. Zalinski, a U.S. army transport ship that sank in 1946. Divers patched the rusting hulk after it started leaking oil in 2003, but they made a hasty exit after discovering the ship held at least a dozen 500-pound bombs. Gulp.
"It's sort of a sleeping giant right now," says Murray Mackay, president of Sidney-based Advanced Subsea Services, the Canadian agent for a Dutch salvage company that would like to tackle the bunker C fuel and munitions trapped in the Zalinski. A coast guard request for money to deal with the slowly ticking time bomb is before the federal Treasury Board.
Mackay, whose company sent divers to check out the Zalinski in October, has heard first-hand the frustration of the Gitga'at, who feel abandoned.
In fact, he says a series of marine emergencies -- the Queen of the North, the Zalinski, the tipping of a barge full of logging equipment in Robson Bight last year, a fire aboard a 42-metre trawler in Burrard Inlet last month -- have awakened many in B.C. to how susceptible the coast is to maritime disaster.
Ship traffic is increasing. Prince Rupert's $170-million container port means a new corridor to China.
Then there are the controversial on-again, off-again proposals to pipe Alberta oil to Kitimat and ship it in tankers that would pass just a couple of kilometres off Hartley Bay. Given the potential for calamity and the tale of woe released by the Transportation Safety Board, you can forgive the Gitga'at -- all of us, really -- for feeling more than a little vulnerable today.
http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=02be2fcb-...
