Pipeline leak invades dream

DAVID ELLIS

It was spring in the British Columbia coastal mountains, a glorious time, no mosquitoes yet, 4,100 feet up, the sun felt hot – you’re closer to it, up here. The last snow patches were hanging on, in the shade of the aromatic balsam firs. I had several times that day pulled a few needles off as I passed, crushed them and put them to my nose. The scent was exhilarating. The roar and murmur of streams and runoff was everywhere; my boots were soaked from fording three swollen creeks.

I was hiking the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline, a pipeline that few know is already carrying tar sands oil, or dilbit, through southern British Columbia. The Enbridge proposal to carry tar sands oil across central British Columbia has been all but canceled, but, even so, anti-pipeline activists have been caught at a disadvantage. With Canadian environmental groups being ravaged by Canadian federal government actions, even David Suzuki has had to resign in order to safeguard the charitable status of his foundation. Now, little attention is being brought to the existence of this old pipeline, as only a handful of environmental groups and some intrepid individuals are speaking out against a massive, Canadian government-supported lobby to expand and “twin” this pipeline. Over the last several months, this lobby has descended on the people of the Interior, many of whom are still out of work since the housing crisis in the United States all but closed down the B.C. logging industry.

On a hunch, I found myself hiking the old pipeline right-of-way, south from the Tulameen Road to the Coquihalla jump-off, where the old pipe drops 1,000 feet in just over a mile. Something had told me it might be fruitful (in terms of locating oil spills) if I approached it from the north this time. The Trans Mountain pipe was now 60 years old, and the Kinder Morgan website was saying that it “was as good as it ever was.” I set out hoping to do all that one man could do to try to stop what seemed the inevitable: a massive spill that could destroy the Fraser River, the heart and soul of this great province.

Before I left my vehicle, I had been listening, every 30 minutes, to radio ads in which the self-assured voice of the president of Kinder Morgan Canada, Ian Anderson, was asking the rural people of British Columbia to help make the “twinning” project “better.” He was saying that the new project – and the old pipe – were an essential part of the Canadian economy. My thoughts: Was he ever planning to take his grandson salmon fishing in British Columbia?

As I hiked, I reminded myself that the scent of the balsam fir was also the smell of grizzly bear habitat. I had heard this spring of grizzly in the area, so I knew I could meet one at anytime. I was just coming back from a bookselling trip to the Chilcotin and Bella Coola, where I had seen four grizzlies; this, after the four I saw earlier in the year on the Nass Valley lava beds. These are one of the few animals that can and will very quickly kill you if they meet you up close and they get flustered or feel threatened.

Continuing on my way, I moved to a hollow before a sharp rise in the pipeline right-of-way, a mile at the most north of the jump-off. The wind was full in my face, just as it had been when I had met a grizzly at age 17, near Whistler Mountain. That day, I had truly learned the meaning of the word terror. With my recent luck, I was worried that I would meet one again, as I went over the rise. Keeping an eye out for tracks and excrement, I saw oil, instead. Not an oil spill, per se, but an oily film on the water flowing up and through the mossy right-of-way, over an area about 30-by-30 feet, one of those marshy places where you don’t know if you’ll suddenly get a wet boot.

I don’t think I need to report this, I thought, but how could a high-pressure pipeline have a “small” leak? Maybe it’s just some oil rising from a discarded oilcan from years ago? Then I recalled a Kinder Morgan press quote from the week before, regarding the spill at Kingsvale some 20 miles to the north: “It’s difficult to say how long oil had been escaping. I would say it was a matter of days or weeks rather than months or years, it was a very, very, very slow leak. It’s almost classified as a ‘weep.’”

Was this a “weep” about to be a spill? Kinder Morgan would not have spotted this from their helicopter flyovers, just as flyovers had not spotted the Kingsvale “weep.” That one was found by a crew, who just happened to be repairing the pipe nearby. I could see no recent vehicle treads as I hiked the pipeline, and it appeared that there had been no ground inspection.

Kinder should be hiking this daily, I thought – the Fraser River is at risk! What an insult to us in the West, pushing us to accept more pipelines, full of lots of nasty oil that could potentially destroy what we value most.

Up and over the little hump I went, no bear to be seen, or even deer. I came to a small lake before the jump-off and noted that a) no trout were rising and b) pieces of Styrofoam could be seen around the edges, the same material that I saw on an inspection of the lower part of the jump-off a few weeks prior. Perhaps the pipe, when lowered into place in the treacherous jump-off area was protected by it? There is a rare book I have for sale that includes a picture of workers lowering the pipe in this spot years ago. In the days of declining budgets and staff and digitalization, many historical documents no longer make their way into the few archives we have in the province. Even the University of British Columbia doesn’t have this book, I recalled, and I made a mental note to show them a copy this summer.

The wind hit me hard as I looked down the jump-off to the Coquihalla Canyon. Looking down at the soft soil, I saw vehicle tracks. I guessed these were Kinder Morgan or, more likely, National Energy Board (NEB), tracks for, in my recent visit with members of the Kamloops press, we had also noticed mild treads, not the year-round Kinder maintenance tracks, but perhaps from a Kinder corporate car – you had to have keys to get into the access road. Why the sudden inspection? I wondered if the report I e-mailed to them (and to members of the press and the RCMP, among others) actually had an impact? Perhaps the Kinder Morgan and NEB executives had not even known of the jump-off, and had come to see it? People are retiring earlier these days, and corporate and government memories are getting shorter, especially when companies so often change ownership. After the recent local spill, a press article had noted: “Although he did not know how old this specific section of the Trans Mountain pipe is ... [a KM employee] did say the pipeline in general has been in operation since 1953.”

I first heard of the recent spill from someone at one of my book sales. That night, I dreamed about it, and even guessed its location. And, here I was, walking down the Terasen/FortisBC right-of-way, beside the Kinder pipeline, and there was the spill site, spotlights and all, exactly where I had dreamed it, just north of the repair site.

I thought of the great book Maps and Dreams by Hugh Brody, who had gotten to know the Beaver (Dunneza) First Nations people of northern British Columbia. It is often in our dreams, he writes, that we bring together technical data with our spiritual selves, along with the fragments of other collected information in our consciousness. The Beaver lived and still live in a vast land where moose are, today, scarce – and finding, or remembering, good hunting areas takes some creative dreaming. So, I found, did finding pipeline leaks.

On a number of occasions as I traveled by the pipeline this spring, I made a visit to a spot near the Kingsvale spill that was being “daylighted” (oilman talk for “dug out”) so a section of corroded pipe, located by means of GPS (so kindly provided free by the U.S. military) could be fixed. The repairmen, who I had watched one day from a distance, had tried to make a culvert of permeable stream pebbles on each side of the flagged area to get drainage. Things did not go well, however; water continued to flow down the pipe and filled the hole where the pipe was being daylighted. When I visited the next week, late one evening, there were no warning signs or barriers on the access road, and I drove right up to the pit – I was able to peer down at the exposed 60-year-old pipe. The NEB requires the “maintenance of fencing around any exposed pipeline,” but here there were no barriers and I couldn’t believe that there were no guards present. Could I take them to court, I wondered? Could the NEB?

I connect this situation to why there is now, in 740 miles of pipeline, a break nearby. First, it could be due to the weeks of heavy equipment disturbance at the repair site, whose vibrations might have caused the pipe damage. Second, there could be an accumulation of corrosion-causing sediment affecting the protective coating of the pipeline right before it takes a sudden jog upward.

I can already hear the Kinder technical staff fuming, when they read of my “theories.” I am not a pipeline expert, but I have accumulated 62 years of common sense. And, perhaps, I have learned to dream, bringing together a large quantity of accumulated knowledge and experience, as I have roamed this great province in search of its secrets and its realities.

David Ellis is a bookseller who travels widely to supply school, university and First Nations libraries in British Columbia and Alberta. He carries rare books on many issues, particularly related to First Nations ethnography and B.C. history. With a background as a commercial fisherman and later a fisheries planner, he has served as head of Fisheries, Pacific, with the Canadian endangered species organization COSEWIC and for the David Suzuki Foundation, researching salmon farming. He has also worked as an activist to improve herring, halibut and salmon management, and the Canada/U.S. salmon treaty. Of late, he has become an observer and a critic of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline, which now ships tar sands oil (dilbit) near the Thompson and Fraser rivers.

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