Dear sir,

We should all be deeply concerned about Enbridge Northern Gateway opening up the north coast to oil tanker traffic.

When you consider the price tag of a new super tanker to be at least $150 million and the cost to charter one in the region of $55,000 a day, many owners will hesitate to perform often urgent repairs. Time out for repairs cuts into their profits.

Cover-ups are common, because admitting there may be a problem makes one harder to sell. Crew members have quietly gone on record fearing job losses if they were to ‘blow the whistle’ - on even the serious defects.

Tanker owners can and do ‘shop around’ for the most forgiving certification society. For example, in 1999 the oil tanker “Erika” broke apart at sea for lack of maintenance.

Before the mishap, the ship’s owners were refused certification by their usual classification society, so they switched to another that was willing to overlook the problems.

Eighteen months later, the ‘Erika’ went down - the worst spill in two decades - covering 250 miles of Europe’s coastline with oil.

The ‘Erika” was the last big oil spill and had nothing to do with the fact that she was a single hull. Lack of maintenance, hiding the truth, and severe rust were the culprits.

Even so, the mounting public outcry following on from the “Exxon Valdez” shifted the focus to the double hull as the “magic bullet” to replace the fleet of aging single hulled tankers.

Fearing oil spills, more and more jurisdictions are encouraging tankers to unload away from shore. This is done 60 miles offshore from Galveston and 25 miles offshore from Louisiana and at other ports on the Eastern seaboard.

This, coupled with the fleet of newer double hulled tankers which haven’t yet reached a critical age, may explain the current lull in gargantuan oil spills.

However, many oil tanker experts fear a coming wave of double hull disasters is just on the horizon.

The aging single hull tankers are being replaced with modern double hulls. With the oldest in the fleet approaching 20 years, it is too soon to tell how safe they really are.

Their built-in features cause them to corrode up to three times faster than the old single hulls they replace.

To reduce construction costs, many of them are made with thinner, more flexible steel. This steel corrodes just as fast as the thicker steel it replaces, but reaches the critical thickness years sooner.

The corrosion chemistry with double hulls is unique, complicated, and some fear that with sub-standard maintenance, is a 20-year-old chemistry experiment just waiting to explode.

In the event of a serious oil spill, who will pay?

The ‘Erika’ sailed under the flag of Malta, was managed by an Italian operator, and chartered by a Bahamian company headquartered in Switzerland. The Maltese ‘owner’ was itself owned by two Liberian firms.

The decrepit ship passed every inspection by its Italian registration society in the year prior to its sinking. So who would be responsible for an oil spill on the north coast and who would pay for the cleanup? What will the BC taxpayer end up subsidizing?

Why should we willingly expose our marine ecosystem along the North Coast to a tanker industry that is almost completely self-regulated, operating corrosion-prone, largely untested behemoths in extremely heavy seas with twisting narrow channels and many unexposed reefs?

No amount of promised tethered tug boat escorts will eliminate all these problems.

The topic of tug boat escorts for super tankers is another issue. Because of their high operating costs, three of the major West Coast ports either dropped the tethered escorts entirely (Port of San Francisco); is trying to place one on standby only (Puget Sound); or tried to reduce from two to one only (Port of Valdes).

It took a bill in the Alaska State Congress to reverse the threatened reduction in service in the latter case. Promises made early are easily broken.

Human error which ultimately permitted sea water to enter the fuel tanks was the cause of the stranding and ultimate sinking of the oil tanker “Braer” off the Shetlands in 1993.

The nearest tug boat capable of lending the required assistance was only two and a half hours away, and yet could not get to the stricken vessel in time to save it.

Opening up the North Coast to super tanker traffic will place us at a very strong likelihood of a similar tragedy repeating itself here.

At the very least we need an independent public inquiry.

Dave Shannon,

Terrace.