B.C. Ministry of Environment - Reasonable Response?

In light of the recent actions of the City of Abbotsford spreading chicken manure to discourage squatters camping on public property, and the apparent stonewalling of the Provincial Ministry of Environment in response to queries of their possible involvement, I thought I ought to relate an incident in which I was involved as an interested observer. The text below was originally compiled in late July 2012, and subsequent commentary added in June 2013.

Environmental Witch Hunt

Canadian International Minerals (CIN) is a public company engaged in minerals exploration. For the past two years (2010-2011) it has carried out exploration drilling in the Wicheeda Lake area, some 80 km northeast of Prince George, BC. All of its employees and contractors are responsible individuals fully aware of the necessity of maintaining the constraints and requirements of environmentally acceptable conduct.

The project had reached the drilling stage in the late fall of 2010, and four holes were drilled with helicopter access, and corresponding high cost, prior to snow conditions precluding further work. The following spring, long in advance of snow melt and possible mobilization, applications were submitted for required permits to construct a series of bulldozer trails, each in the order of a few hundred metres, for access to proposed drill sites. We should note that in a concurrent project in Ontario no permits were required for similar activity.

Several months elapsed, and in spite of repeated enquiry, no permits materialized. Thus in order not to be constrained again by fall weather, CIN decided, in desperation, and at vastly increased cost, to drill with helicopter support once more. The drilling equipment and supplies were trucked to the closest existing road access near the drill sites, and airlifted from there, with most of the supplies and fuel being left at this remote roadside site and delivered to the drill as needed during the twice daily helicopter shift changes or drill moves. Shortly before the end of the job, the company was notified by Ministry of Environment (MoE) officials that there had been an oil spill at its storage location, requiring immediate action. Upon investigation, the spill was determined to have been leakage of a remnant of diesel fuel from an empty drum which had been overturned in an act of apparent vandalism.

The company, in order to mitigate the problem as best it could, instructed their contract employee, a member of the local Indian Band, to remove all the drums and other materials to a secure location back in town. The spilled fuel, initially making a visible patch around the empty drum, being relatively volatile, was now becoming less visible, and the odour dissipated. However, it appears that an “Environmental Emergency” had been declared, resulting in the issuance of a Pollution Prevention Order by the Emergency Response Officer under the Environmental Emergencies Program. This requires the alleged perpetrator to: “Retain a Qualified Professional (QP) to assess the site for hydrocarbon contamination and detriment if soil, groundwater or other surface waters have been impacted. The QP shall provide a report to the ministry detailing the site investigation and findings”.

These demands being made in late fall, were seasonally delayed by mother nature and the onset of winter snow, but were renewed in spring long before the snow had retreated from the relatively elevated location. When the snow was finally gone, and action might be taken, it is the company's contention that due to the volatile nature of the fuel, finding the exact location of the spill will be difficult, and treatment of the “soil”, which is in fact compacted roadbed, even more challenging. However, the stridency of the demands continues to increase, now with the threat of the Ministry mobilizing its own resources to carry out the mitigation at the company's expense.

In the meantime, CIN was, at the commencement of work, required to post a bond with the ministry, the understanding being that this was to cover contingencies of this nature. However all attempts to have this bond paid out to cover the cost of retaining the QP have been thwarted by continual stonewalling, but the threats, which are documented, have become ever more strident.

The present impasse raises two significant questions, for which there should be relatively simple answers. The first is how such spill happened and became such a concern for the government agency, and the second is whether the response is reasonable. Unfortunately the answer to the first is speculative, and the second is a matter of opinion.

Local scuttlebutt indicates that the spill and its “discovery” are likely to have occurred as follows. There is a local hunting outfitter fairly close by, who was upset by the helicopter traffic ostensibly scaring away the game which is his livelihood, and wants to make a point. So he drives to the storage area and upsets one of the empty fuel drums which still has a small quantity of diesel fuel in the bottom. He then calls the Provincial Fish and Game officer, who is likely a friend, to report an oil spill, and directs him to the location.

The Ministry's response to this occurrence, which has produced no evidence of significant environmental damage, and appears to us substantially less harmful than runoff from any commercial or residential parking area, might be appropriate for an event like the Exxon Valdez disaster, but appears in this instance to be a highly inappropriate deployment of public resources.

The above narrative was compiled in late July, 2012, as a result of a continuing email campaign by Ministry of Environment officials in Prince George to force CIN into escalating expenditures, starting with a site assessment by a “Qualified Professional” and continuing with threats of remediation work being ordered and undertaken by the Ministry, with expenditure details that evoked costs readily mounting to a six figure range. The culmination of the official harassment came in February of this year, when the company president was ordered to attend a meeting with a conservation officer at the MoE office in Surrey. I was asked by the company to attend this meeting, and I summarized the experience with the following email, dated February 6, 2013.

Meeting this morning was anti-climactic, and essentially we can expect to hear no more of this matter.

We went to the Guildford office of the B.C. Ministry of Environment at the request of Conservation Officer Alex Desjardins, who met us in a grim reception area and invited Mike alone to come to his office. I would judge he was in his early 20s and was dressed in a dark uniform complete with black flak jacket and sidearm. When I asked why the sidearm, he responded that I must not know what a conservation officer does. Anyway, he and Mike disappeared for about 20 minutes, while I cooled my heels in the elevator lobby. The upshot was that he turned on a recorder and asked Mike a bunch of standard questions regarding what happened and who was responsible for a variety of functions such as fuel logistics, and overall supervision. Mike's replies were either "it's in the email correspondence" or "I am" to the "who" questions. The guy gave the impression that he is swamped with this sort of follow up, which is why it took almost 2 years to get here, and he was just going through the motions because that's what was expected.

I won't burden you with copies of the documentation, except to provide you with the recommendation of the NOAA as to how to deal with incidents such as this. In light of two principal observations: 1. Small diesel spills will usually evaporate and disperse naturally within a day or less, and 2. Diesel oil is readily and completely degraded by naturally occurring microbes, under time frames of one to two months; I would suggest that there is not any further harassment to be expected. The meeting was a complete waste of time, and I would be tempted to ask - as a taxpayer - what this bureaucratic boondoggle has cost me, and whether anyone is ever likely to be held accountable.

Since the February meeting the company was served with papers in late April requiring payment of fines totalling $2,300 for a number of “offences” including failure to comply with a MoE order. Although there were adequate grounds for disputing these, the company decided that it made more economic sense to capitulate and pay the fines rather than embark on further rounds of potential litigation and associated costs. The remediation that had been demanded by the paper tigers in Prince George would have cost easily twenty times the magnitude of the fine, with no net benefit to anyone.