This week in pollution: B.C. edition

by julianw | July 4, 2008 at 01:24 pm | 389 views | 3 comments

by bcdream2007

Pollution is winning in British Columbia this week; fish and humans are losing. The battle was one sided, with pollution's decisive victory coming on Tuesday night, when a Canadian Pacific Railway car derailed, slid into the Thompson River, and began to leak ethylene glycol -- an ingredient in antifreeze.

A toxic chemical is leaking from a derailed Canadian Pacific Railway car into B.C.'s Thompson River, an Environment Ministry spokeswoman said yesterday.

A local native leader predicted that the spill could have a "devastating" impact on fisheries if it kills, contaminates or confuses what's left of the river's salmon runs.

The car is one of four that derailed on Tuesday evening after a mudslide near Lytton, B.C. The 100,000-litre cars were carrying ethylene glycol, an ingredient in antifreeze, and one of the four is submerged in the Thompson River and leaking the chemical into the water, said ministry spokeswoman Kate Thompson.

Over on Vancouver Island, a gas station is leaking diesel fuel into neighboring properties. The Palmers describe the damage to their carefully maintained, locally renowned garden.

The immaculate garden that Luanne and Don Palmer spent 40 years creating was so picturesque that tour buses often stopped outside their home, in the village of Lake Cowichan on Vancouver Island, so tourists could take snapshots.

But when Mrs. Palmer looked out her window yesterday, it wasn't to admire the sweeping green lawn her husband manicured, or the carefully pruned row of 20 poplars that in bloom seemed like giant white ice cream cones.

Instead, she was looking at a wasteland of deep craters and piles of stinking, contaminated soil.

The show garden of Lake Cowichan is gone – and the Palmer house may be next – as environmental engineers pursue an underground pool of diesel fuel that has leaked out of a gas station adjacent to the property.

“It's a horror show,” said Mrs. Palmer, a retiree who for 25 years worked for the B.C. Forest Service, grafting trees and honing the horticultural skills she used to perfect her one-acre garden.

Fortunately, there was some good symbolic news further up the coast, where a towing company was charged with "unlawfully discharging oil" one year after its barge spilled diesel into a killer whale reserve off Vancouver Island.

Pollution charges have been laid in connection with a barge that overturned in a sensitive killer whale reserve off Vancouver Island.

The barge carrying a fuel truck loaded with 10,000 litres of diesel, logging equipment and buckets of hydraulic oil tipped into Robson Bight off Vancouver Island's east coast last August.

A total of 10 charges have been laid against Gowlland Towing, the owner of the barge, Ted LeRoy, the company that hired the barge and Carl Strom, the skipper of the tug towing the vessel.