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 n the wake of President Obama's decision to place a hold on the Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to Texas, Canadian officials are now turning their sights west -- to British Columbia's Spirit Bear Coast -- as their next-best hope for exporting tar sands oil. The Northern Gateway pipeline, proposed by energy giant Enbridge, would transport the same Alberta tar sands crude to the coastal rain forest habitat of some 400 remaining Spirit Bears, where it would be offloaded at the port of Kitimat to super-tankers heading for Asia and the United States. A pipeline rupture or tanker spill is highly likely and could suffocate the resident orcas and humpback whales, poison marine birds and contaminate the world-class salmon runs on which Spirit Bears depend for survival.
"Enbridge's track record should be setting off alarms," says Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director of NRDC's International Program. The company was responsible for 80 liquid pipeline spills in 2010 alone, including a spill of nearly a million gallons of tar sands oil into Michigan's Kalamazoo River. A new NRDC report, "Pipeline and Tanker Trouble," documents the failures of Enbridge's leak-detection technology and the lack of preparedness on the part of Canadian authorities to deal with a major spill in rugged British Columbia. The report also underscores the grave risks of dramatically increasing tanker traffic along the Spirit Bear Coast, the fourth-most dangerous body of water in the world. This winter, NRDC experts will be presenting these damning facts to a Canadian Joint Review Panel that is tasked with determining the Northern Gateway pipeline's fate. NRDC has joined forces with the members of some 130 First Nations who are fighting the pipeline and has already generated nearly 100,000 messages of opposition to Enbridge and the premier of British Columbia.
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“Enbridge's track record should be setting off alarms.”
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