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My name is Chris Paynter, I have lived in BC all my life. I have spent many years sailing the BC Coast with my family, and I live in Saanichton near the ocean. I have made my living for 25 years designing electronic hardware and software, and for the past five years have been heavily involved with product design for the oceanographic industry. I have lately been designing and building remote sensing equipment which monitors Arctic ice movement and formation. I am here to voice my opposition to the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and associated marine terminal in Kitimat. When I began considering the risks associated with the pipeline and marine terminal which Enbridge proposes to build, my thoughts turned to Richard Feynman, who was a highly respected and outspoken theoretical physicist who live in the United States. After the space shuttle Challenger was destroyed shortly after takeoff in January of 1986, President Ronald Reagan appointed him to the Rogers Commission which sought to investigate the disaster, and Feynman refused to sign the final report until the Commission agreed to include his “Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle” as an appendix to the report. As you might recall, the direct cause of the shuttle’s destruction was a failure of a rubber O-ring in the solid rocket boosters. The Rogers Commission determined that the underlying cause was a systemic disconnect between NASA management and engineering staff. What leads me to draw a comparison between the 1986 Challenger explosion and the proposed Enbridge project is a comment which Feynman makes in his observations: He begins by saying “It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000.” The 1 in 100,000 figure comes from NASA management, while the 1:100 risk assessment comes from NASA’s range engineer, who based the estimate on the history of all previous rocket flights. Feynman goes on to say that if one were to believe the 1 in 100,000 figure, one could expect to successfully launch a shuttle every day for three hundred years and only have one failure. What’s particularly striking to me about this “every day for 300 years” concept is that although it seems like a pretty low risk, it pales in comparison to the even more remote possibility of a major spill which has been mentioned by Enbridge. They have been quoted as saying that the risk of a major spill was “something like 1 in 15,000 years”, which improves on the NASA safety estimate by a factor of fifty. Feynman goes on to say about the shuttle risk assessment that “if the probability of failure was as low as 1 in 100,000 it would take an inordinate number of tests to determine it ( you would get nothing but a string of perfect flights from which no precise figure, other than that the probability is likely less than the number of such flights in the string so far). But, if the real probability is not so small, flights would show troubles, near failures, and possible actual failures with a reasonable number of trials”. What we know now about the shuttle program is that there WERE troubles, near failures, and actual failures of the O-ring design, which, had NASA management been paying attention, should have been a red flag that there was a serious flaw in their risk assessment. What I believe we are seeing with the Enbridge proposal is the exact same situation. We have on one hand management claiming an extremely low risk of a major spill, and on the other hand a series of “troubles, near failures, and actual failures”. To paraphrase Feynman, what we see when examining Enbridge’s safety record, and that of the petroleum and shipping industries as a whole is not a “string of perfect flights”, but a history of troubles both large and small. Here are a few of them: • Enbridge’s records indicate an average of about 80 spills per year between 1999 and 2010, resulting in the cumulative release of about 26,000,000 litres of oil into the environment. • In spite of Enbridge’s state commitment to improving performance, the pattern of spills remains pretty much unchanged. • When Enbridge’s pipeline burst in Kalamazoo in 2010, it took 17 hours for them to shut down the leak. • Brian Falconer has looked at nearly a dozen oil ship terminals around the world. None of those operated for longer than 18 years before tankers they loaded experienced major spills • In our own waters, there have been three shipping incidents in the past several months alone, where large vessels ran aground or lost power. • The Queen of the North ran aground and sank near Gil Island, in Douglas Channel where Enbridge proposes to run tankers. These “troubles, near failures and actual failures” should be a red flag that the risks of a spill are very significant, and that it would not be unreasonable to expect a major spill during the 30 year lifespan of the proposed project, just as we saw two shuttles destroyed out of 135 flights in 30 years. At the conclusion of Feynman’s report on the Challenger he said, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled”. I believe that this applies to the Enbridge proposal, and the that reality and history show that there is a pretty good chance of a major disaster. So, having concluded for myself that a spill, either on land or at sea is a very real probability, I find myself leaving the world of facts and figures, deliverables and quantifiable results in which I spend much of my working life, and asking myself what it would feel like to wake up one morning to hear on the CBC radio that a tanker had leaked in the Douglas Channel. When I imagine that possibility I am overwhelmed with sadness for the millions of creatures that make our coast their home and for the thousands of people who make their lives on our coast. A spill on the BC Coast to me is an unforgiveable loss, one that does not have to happen. It would mean to me that the human race had failed in its duty to live in harmony on the world, and failed to see that we are all living in closed ecosystem which we are rapidly filling up with our garbage. It would mean that we as a species are no smarter than a petri dish full of bacteria who multiply until they are killed by their own waste products. Enbridge talks about risk assessment, and proposes various technical solutions to minimize the risk of spills, but there is no amount of compensation or cleanup that would bring back our coast once it is damaged irrevocably by a marine spill. This is a risk which no amount of mathematics or modeling can offset. Nature cannot be fooled. |