BC Pipeline Bombings
Residents of Peace River region call gas development 'a tsunami' as saboteur's deadline passes
Chris Arsenault
Vue Weekly, September 15, 2009.
The Peace River region, a rugged frontier on the Alberta-BC border, is anything but peaceful these days. Once serene cattle and canola country, the area is in the midst of a massive transformation, fuelled by vast unconventional sour gas reserves lying some two kilometres under the earth's surface. And since October 2008, someone has blown up six sour gas pipelines operated by EnCana, North America's largest gas corporation, in controlled acts of sabotage.
In Wild West fashion, EnCana is offering a one-million-dollar bounty for information leading to a conviction. It is likely the largest reward in Canadian history (the RCMP offered the same amount during the hunt for those who blew up Air India, killing 329 people).
The Integrated National Security Enforcement Team (INSET), a mix of top law enforcement officials tasked with investigating the attacks, has sent some 250 officers to the region, located six hours from Edmonton. The force includes masked men with high-powered machine guns who have been spotted in the woods by local residents and a sniper flown back directly from Afghanistan. INSET labels the sabotage as "eco-terrorism" even though no one has been hurt.
The bomber apparently sees it differently. "Return the land to what it was before you came every last bit of it ... before things get a lot worse for you and your terrorist pals in the oil and gas business," wrote the alleged bomber in a July 15 letter sent to the Dawson Creek Daily News. The badly printed, hand-written letter demanded EnCana cease operations in the area. It also promised to suspend attacks during a three-month grace period so "we can all take a summer vacation," meaning attacks could recommence now that September 15 has passed.
At a July press conference, police accused the saboteur of "terrorizing these communities of Pouce Coupe and Dawson Creek." But the Mayor of Pouce Coupe, a village of 749 residents at the epicentre of Peace River gas activity, doesn't see it that way.
"I have discussed this [sabotage] with some pipeline workers," says Mayor Lyman Clark, a vocal supporter of the gas industry, during an interview at the village's office. "One just frankly told me, 'I am more afraid of the bears.'"
Despite low natural gas prices, drilling activity continues at an almost frantic pace on the BC side of the border—as Mayor Clark puts it, "The whole area is in a boom right now, unlike the rest of the world economy." Shiny new pickup trucks line the roads from Dawson Creek to Fort St. John. Since 2000, companies have drilled more than 10 000 oil and gas wells in the region, and in 2008 the BC government collected more than $3.6 billion dollars from selling drilling rights and reaping royalties. And the boom shows no signs of slowing down as companies compete to lay claims to underground leases, even at current prices, which analysts don't think will stay down indefinitely.
But as sour gas lines cut into fields of canola, companies flare toxic chemicals lighting up the night sky with an eerie glow and trucks kick up dust on previously tranquil dirt roads, some local residents say increased production is coming at their expense.
"The pace of the development hit us like a tsunami," says Tim Ewert, an organic farmer living near Tomslake, in the heart of the sabotage area.
"We counted 82 trucks pass the house one day before noon," says Woody Ewert, Tim's son, after coming into the farmhouse fresh from plowing the fields. "The amount of dust that traffic generates on our gravel road is incredible. Our lawn would look like we were in a fog bank, but it was just dust."
But Brian Liverse, a spokesperson for EnCana, the region's largest player and so far the only target of sabotage, says his company works hard to be a good neighbour. The corporation has a program called "courtesy matters" where contractors are expected to drive less than 50 kilometres per hour to minimize dust and noise.
"Where we have a large amount of regular traffic, we put calcium down on the roads to reduce the dust," Liverse adds during an interview in a sparse boardroom at the company's Dawson Creek field office. "We try to avoid rig moves and a large amount of traffic when school buses are picking up their kids." The company, he adds, also supports numerous charitable projects in the Peace River region.
While Tim Ewert agrees that EnCana has tried to mitigate dust and other surface issues, he says all the companies extracting gas from the area have failed to address larger environmental concerns.
"There were never any baseline studies done on air or water. They never checked to see what size or how deep the local aquifers were before starting the whole drilling program," says Tim Ewert, as we sip hot coffee, fresh off the stove, at his kitchen table. Ewert worries that cumulative impacts from the gas boom could damage the local water supply, create harmful air pollution or leave sulfuric residue on his fields.
"Gas plants are flaring 24/7," says Peter Kut, a municipal councillor in Pouce Coupe. "That concerns some people, too. They don't know what toxic materials come from the burns."
Much of the region's gas is sour, containing hydrogen sulfide, a "highly toxic gas" which can cause death within a few breaths, according to the US Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Industry's incursions into previously pristine land are "changing the way of life, our hunting, trapping, berry picking even just going camping," says Cliff Calliou, hereditary Chief of the Kelly Lake First Nation, an aboriginal community with some 500 residents a 30-minute drive from sabotaged sites.
After the first attacks in the fall of 2008, police and media speculated—without evidence—that the bomber came from Kelly Lake. Chief Calliou calls the police actions in his community a "witch hunt."
"They [police] threw two people in jail with no charges," Chief Calliou says during an interview at Kelly Lake's community centre. In addition to the unwarranted jailing of Kelly Lake residents, police also accused 76-year-old Regina Mortensen, a grandmother recovering from hip surgery, of sabotaging the pipelines.
The Kelly Lake First Nation, which maintains traditional governance structures outside of the Indian Act, hasn't surrendered its traditional land base via a treaty. Despite the region's resource wealth, many houses in Kelly Lake are ramshackle trailers. Natives say the gas is being stolen from unceeded land and they have launched a $5.2 billion-dollar land claim for recompense.
Most people who live near sabotaged sites aren't against extracting gas, per se. Rather, they say regulations favour corporations over landowners and the environment. Companies, with their teams of lawyers, engineers and experts, often understand the regulations better than the cash-strapped provincial government which is supposed to be overseeing extraction.
Ken and Loretta Vause have farmed near Dawson Creek for the last 30 years, growing cereals, canola and grass seed. "We have three [gas] leases on our property and a pipeline," Ken Vause, who used to work on a drilling rig, says as we chat at their kitchen table.
The Vauses say they "never had a problem" with the industry until the latest round of negotiations, the first since BC's gas boom really got going at the beginning of the 21st century.
"A land agent came here for an hour, he didn't show us any plans for where the new pipeline would go," Ken recalls. In BC, unlike Alberta, land agents—the people who represent gas companies in negotiations with farmers—don't have to be registered, a situation farmers say leads to all sorts of abuses. In previous encounters with gas companies, the Vauses had always managed to negotiate deals for pipeline routes and compensation. But not in today's booming BC; the pipeline ended up cutting through the middle of an active field. The land agent, a former RCMP officer, filed papers with the Mediation and Arbitration Board (MAB), the provincial body responsible for ruling on disputes, without ever explaining where the pipeline was going, says Vause.
The Vauses, like many farmers, consider the MAB a "kangaroo court" which favours gas companies at farmers' expense. Once the land agent, representing Calgary-based Spectra Energy, filed MAB papers, the Vauses hired a lawyer and drove to Grand Prairie to be in the lawyer's office for a conference call with representatives from Spectra and the MAB.
"On the conference call, everyone identifies themselves," Vause recalls. "When Spectra's representative introduced himself, the mediator [from the MAB] said, 'Oh, how are you Brian? Haven't talked to you in a while.' The mediator knew him personally. You don't stand a chance.
"This pipeline they put here, I am stuck with the liability forever," Vause continues. "I never signed a paper or anything for it, but I am still liable. If I drive over it and damage it, I am responsible."
The Vauses received $19 000 dollars from Spectra as compensation for the land disturbance, which didn't even cover half their legal bills.
Tom Flanagan, a political science professor at the University of Calgary, agrees farmers consider present regulations unfair, and says it's driving hostility to the industry in the area.
"Maybe part of the answer [to dealing with sabotage] would be to amend the legislation for companies to pay greater compensation to surface rights owners," Flanagan suggests.
Making laws less favourable to oil companies isn't easy, especially for provinces increasingly dependent on petroleum revenues. An article in the Journal of Environmental Management argues that Alberta is a "first world jurisdiction" with a "third world analogue" in its lax environmental and political regulation of the oil industry. Area farmers say BC is even worse than Alberta, which might help to explain why drilling rigs are moving across the border from Alberta to BC in record numbers.
"The BC government has some excellent programs to stimulate their economy and oil and gas activity in the area," according to EnCana's Brian Liverse.
But critics of the current regulatory regime say gas companies can buy political support at their expense. EnCana, for example, has donated $255 470 to the governing BC Liberals between 2005 and 2008. The Liberals, in turn, have used monies from their economic stimulus to build roads and other infrastructure primarily to facilitate gas extraction in the region.
In a dozen interviews, not one Peace River resident, including harsh critics of the oil industry, supported the sabotage, but some are happy that their complaints are finally being noticed.
"I don't condone what this person [the bomber] is doing," says Rick Koechl, a junior-high-school teacher who lives some 40 minutes from the bombed sites and an activist pushing for sour gas wells to be set back at least a kilometre from houses and schools, "but at least it's bringing attention to the situation up here. We've had legal organizations help us with this fight, but that's not very sexy, is it?"
Attacks in northeastern BC aren't the first case of high profile sabotage against Canadian sour gas pipelines. An Alberta court on April 20, 2000 convicted Wiebo Ludwig, a well-known farmer and preacher, of bombing gas wells owned Alberta Energy Co. Ltd. (AEC)—which in 2002 merged with PanCanadian to form EnCana. Ludwig claimed his wife miscarried a child because of sour gas exposure. During their investigation of Ludwig and his associates, police admitted to blowing up a gas well themselves in order gain credibility for an informant. EnCana reps refused to comment on what, if anything, the company learned from the Ludwig saga.
As the September 15 deadline for resuming attacks passes, Ludwig has re-entered the limelight, this time with an open letter to the bomber asking him or her to end the attacks. The sabotage campaign has stimulated "valuable discussion" about the dangers of unrestrained petroleum development, wrote Ludwig, but he urges the bomber to "realize that these conflicts cannot ultimately be settled by use of force, but by way of informed and patient persuasion."
But while attempts at persuasion continue, profits from the region's gas are building the towers of Calgary and Vancouver and feeding the provincial treasury in Victoria. While oil workers move to northeastern BC in search of well-paying jobs as truck drivers, pipefitters, inspectors and technicians, June Volz says those with a connection to the land are getting busted up by the current boom.
Volz has farmed in the region for decades and has no intrinsic complaints with the gas industry—rent from pipelines are, after all, putting her kids through university. But Volz says the respectful tone which defined interactions between industry and residents through the 1980s and '90s has changed since the boom started.
"[Negotiating with oil companies] was almost kind of fun.They'd make an offer and you'd go back and forth. And it was always with respect." Volz says as we sip iced tea. "[Now] there is a great degree of arrogance on the part of companies."
When asked what made relations go sour, Volz pauses for a minute before saying, "I think that they [gas companies] are getting a lot of support from the government. The oil companies and government are at the dinner table and the farmers are underneath the table looking for crumbs." V
