Cleanup and salvage efforts have been hampered by storms on the British Columbia coast, where a sunken tug continues to leak fuel 11 days after it ran aground near Bella Bella, in the Great Bear Rainforest.
Matt Woodruff, information officer with the industry-funded unified command group that is handling the operation, said fuel spill containment booms failed at one point, allowing slicks to escape from around the grounded tug, Nathan E. Stewart.
HEILTSUK IN SHOCK AS CRITICAL BARRIER
CONTAINING SPILL BREAKS FREE
Bella Bella (October 22, 2016) –– Heiltsuk Chief Marilyn Slett says her community is in a state of shock today as spilled diesel oil has broken free of barriers to contain it and weather worsens.
A little more than a year ago, B.C. activist Ingmar Lee told a reporter that the petroleum-hauling vessel Nathan E. Stewart was a “disaster waiting to happen.”
Early Wednesday morning, that fear was realized when the American-owned articulated tug and barge ran aground near Bella Bella. Although the barge was empty after dropping off its cargo in Alaska, the tugboat began leaking fuel into the water, threatening the traditional clam fisheries of the Heiltsuk First Nation.
“It’s unfortunately a terrible thing to see it sunk there,” Lee said Thursday.
The site where the Pacheedaht people originated — their Garden of Eden — is stunning.
The Jordan River exits a 500-metre-deep canyon, then tumbles toward the sea through a jumble of immense boulders polished as smooth as beach pebbles.
It was here, about 70 kilometres west of Victoria, in a past so ancient it predates legends of a great flood that inundated the world, that the Pacheedaht took their name from foam on the river.
Today, there’s still foam on the river. It signals not the birth of a people, but the death of their river.
Eddie Gardner President, Wild Salmon Defenders Alliance
From: Eddie Gardner [mailto:singingbear@telus.net]
Sent: Friday, September 23, 2016 10:31 AM
Subject: Letter of Solidarity with Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw Eviction of Fish Farms
Hi All,
Your assistance in circulating this to the mass media would be greatly appreciated. We are encouraging others to send messages of support and solidarity with Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw to Dominic LeBlanc as Chief Michelle Lee Edwards did.
Campbell River meeting comes as Morton video of farmed fish goes viral. [See video with original article - Alex Morton captured underwater video of farmed salmon during Musgamagw Dzawada’enuxw protest action. Photo from YouTube. ]
More than 50 First Nations protestors, including several hereditary chiefs, called for the eviction of multinational-owned fish farms from “unceded” territorial waters in Campbell River on Monday.
This year’s Fraser River sockeye run is the lowest in more than 120 years, and the Watershed Watch Salmon Society says it all has to do with climate change.
“The salmon are suffering because of the changing environment of which we, as British Columbians, have some responsibility for,” said WWSS fisheries adviser Greg Taylor of the fishery, which ended Aug. 12.
“There ‘s a great link between (Premier) Christy Clark’s inaction on climate change and river temperatures that are lethal to salmon.”
The steady loss of the kelp removes an important habitat for other species and has a cascading effect through the marine environment, a Halifax marine biologist warns.
Once rich forests of willowy kelp that stretch along Nova Scotia’s coast have been decimated by warming water temperatures, says a marine biologist who warns that the loss could harm other species that rely on them for food.
BC First Nations Leaders in Ottawa to Set Record Straight on Misleading Claims of Support for Petronas’ Pacific Northwest LNG and Call on Trudeau to reject project
The pink salmon runs in Aniva Bay, once among the largest in the world, collapsed after Shell built its LNG facility on the Russian island of Sakhalin in the late '90s.
