Trans Mountain continues to monitor the impacts of a spill of clay-based drilling fluid in a water course near the Mary Hill bypass in Coquitlam last week.
In a statement, the company reported that approximately one cubic meter of bentonite was “inadvertently released” into a watercourse during horizontal directional drilling (HDD) procedures on Friday (Nov. 19).
The drilling is to install a section of pipe from Surrey to Coquitlam for the construction of the pipeline to Burnaby.
Romilly Cavanaugh stood at the edge of the Coquihalla River north of Hope, watching big trees snap off the bank like blades of grass in a lawn mower. Some of those not swept away held dead fish in their branches three metres off the ground — a reminder of what came before.
Cavanaugh and her fellow engineers had been sent into the chaos for a sole purpose: to watch the Trans Mountain pipeline through the flood of 1995.
As part of a series highlighting the work of young people in addressing the climate crisis, writer Patricia Lane interviews Gitxsan youth Shay Lynn Sampson who is doing her part to ensure the Coastal GasLink pipeline never gets built. She was among those arrested in Friday's RCMP raids.
For decades, the fossil fuel industry ran a wildly successful and well-funded campaign to muddy the waters when it came to climate change. It denied the science, created false equivalencies and dumped billions upon billions of dollars into projects designed to protect profits. Then, a few years ago, this lie was exposed just as the impacts of climate change began to be felt widely around the world.
Extreme weather fuelled by climate breakdown is exposing the vulnerability of key infrastructure in British Columbia and is reviving questions among environmentalists and residents about building the Trans Mountain expansion pipeline.
As British Columbia’s New Democratic Party prepares for its first biennial convention since winning the 2020 election, memories of last summer’s deadly heat domes and wildfires still burn deeply. B.C. is experiencing the global consequences of carbon-intensive extractivism – the kind of “rip and ship” (extract and export) economic policies pursued by the previous right-of-centre B.C. Liberal government for most of its 2001-2017 term of office.
