4 - Sunday, October 22, 1989 - North Shore News -@ strictly personal © SO WHAT did we learn from the Nestucea spill that left 875,000 litres of bunker cil washed up along the shores of Vancouver Island from Carmanah Point to Kyaquot Sound? According to a Canadian Coast Guard report which had to be pried loose from the federal gov- ernment by political force, we learned 43 things. This was the number of recom- mendations contained in the report released by Coast Guard spokesman Jean Valin in Ottawa fast week. He went on to claim that the Coast Guard was now in the process of implementing each of the recommendations. fully slow to act. And our politicians, need | re- mind you, were little more than sleepwalking apologists for the tanker firm. It wasn’t until Jan. 9 that En- vironment Minister Lucien Bouchard got around to making a quick tour of an oil-caked beach, at which point he pronounced himself ‘‘satisfied with the federal response”’ — which until that point had amounted to zilch. VE is worth recalling ... that B.C. Solicitor- General Angus Ree, who was in charge of emergency services, also toured the area of the spill and said that the effects were not as serious as some people had state Nice to hear. Too bad those 43 recommenda- tions weren’t conceived and im- plemented two decades earlier, when they were first demanded in order to protect the coast from the inevitable major spill we all knew was coming. As early 2s 1969, conserva- tionists were calling for a com- prehensive plan to protect the coast. Did tie Coast Guard listen? Did the Canadian government listen? Did the B.C. government listen? We all know the answer. When a tugboat collided with the oil barge Nestucca off the coast of Washington State last Dec. 23, and the Yanks brilliantly towed the crippled barge out to sea so that the spill began to drift north, the guardians of our waters were not only fast asleep at the switch, they were totally in the dark. In the age of instantaneous satel- lite and Fax communications, Ca- nadian officials had no idea of what was about to hit the beaches. According to the Coast Guard report, Canadian scientists were working with the wrong informa- tion, so they made the wrong deci- sions. Canadian agencies were piti- Solid Oak Arrow Back DINER reg. $159.00 SALE $9900 Bouchard saw no reason then “to fault the safety or monitoring procedures in place’’ to protect the coast from spills. Likewise, he saw no reason to send the army in to help with the cleanup. Nearly a year later, the Coast Guard has finally got around to coming up with 43 reasons to im- prove those safety and monitoring procedures that Bouchard saw no reason to fault. He was “‘optimistic” that the worst of the spill was over. And then there was his famous quote: “If you send in the army, you have to pay.”’ In other words, let the users of the beaches and the waters pay. The federal treasury must remain unmolested except for essential expenses, like senators’ salaries and executive jets for cabinet ministers. This is not to blame the army, by the way, which was ready to send men into action within hours of learning of the spill. The of- ficers in charge, in fact, were as- tounded to learn the y were not be- ing asked tc act. It was purely a lack of political will that left the beaches undefended. Or maybe it was pure anid FINES eae auhes| cro political stupidity. Eleven days after Bouchard’s fatuous remark, the private con- tractor who was to have been bill- ed, instead of the army being uscd, reneged on an agreement to hire more staff, The feds had to turn to native work crews to help exhausted vol- unteers who had been waging a lonely battle to save the beaches that neither Ottawa nor Victoria could see were in peril. It is worth recalling, while we’re at it, that B.C. Solicitor-General Angus Ree, who was in charge of emergency services, also toured the area of the spill and said that the effects were not as serious as some people had stated. Ten days elapsed between the time of the spill and the time it first washed up on the beaches near Tofino. And for the next two weeks, federal and provincial of- ficials contented themselves with a string of pronouncements denying the spill posed any kind of serious problem. Okay. Enough of that. Accord- ing to Robert Bossin, spokesman for the group of 200 promine.: : B.C. residents who were resp - isi- ble for getting the Coast Guard report released to the public, the report itself is admirable to the ex- tent that the Coast Guard didn’t try to simply whitewash the whole sordid affair. The report calls for more train- ing for government officials, maps that show environmentally-sen- sitive areas, improvements in con- tingency planning, bette: methods of detecting and monitoring oil movements, and new policies relating to initial response to a spill and the use of the military, natives and volunteers. All this is wonderful. And more wonderful yet is the Coast Guard’s assurance that its 43 recommenda- tions for improvements are being implemented right away. But one still has to ask: why did we have to wait until the entire coast of Vancouver Island had been violated before waking up to the fact that we were ill-prepared and ill-equipped, our guard was down, and our leadership was weak-kneed and fuzzy-brained? 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