Last winter, I found myself descending slowly down a black wall. My dive partner, Tavish Campbell, somewhere off to my left, was only recognizable by the narrow beam of his dive light.
The depth gauge registered 30 metres, so I figured I must have missed the shipwreck. I kicked off into the water column and suddenly found myself face to face with a towering wall of steel, long lines of rivets disappeared into the dark.
I was staring at the shipwreck of the the 76-metre-long USAT Brigadier General M.G. Zalinski, a U.S. army transport ship that sank in the Grenville channel north of Hartley Bay in 1946.
Just on the other side of the steel hull, it is reported that 12 227-kilogram aerial bombs and countless smaller munitions lay undisturbed. Surprisingly, late on that wet and windy night so many years ago, the ship rolled down the steep wall and landed on a very narrow ledge. By all accounts it should have kept rolling to the bottom, another 76 metres.
Fast-forward to today, and the Zalinski is back in the news with the Canadian Coast Guard planning to remove the 600 or so tonnes of bunker oil (it’s unclear if it plans to remove the bombs) entombed inside.
The media are reporting this will help bolster the government’s claim that the coast guard’s oil-spill response capability is “world class” and can handily deal with ever-increasing liquefied natural gas and bitumen-tanker proposals facing the Great Bear Rainforest. But I don’t follow.
First, the coast guard had 70 years to figure out how to clean up the Zalinski wreck, yet suddenly it is spending a reported $50 million (and probably substantially more) during the winter storm season? The cleanup of the Zalinski is conveniently timed to coincide with the December decision by the National Energy Board on Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipeline and tanker proposal.
The other issue that raises eyebrows is Canada’s choice of hiring the Dutch company Mammoet to do the cleanup. This seems to tell us more about Dutch capabilities than our own.
And what does the Zalinski have to do with modern Canadian oil-spill cleanup capabilities? The ship is sitting in 30 metres of water in the relatively calm and protected waters of Grenville Channel. These are dream maritime conditions for an oil-spill cleanup by any standards on this coast. If the ship had kept rolling on that late night so many years ago, more than likely the coast guard would have continued to ignore the problem, similar to its ongoing response to the Queen of the North wreck.
The Grenville Channel does get strong currents, but it cannot be compared to the treacherous waters a few kilometres to the south that would have to be navigated daily by 460-metre-long tankers carrying two million barrels of oil.
The best thing that this $50-million cleanup will achieve is something that should have been done years ago and at the expense of the U.S. government (it was their ship that sank, after all), yet somehow Canadians are supposed to feel comforted by our coast guard’s ability to conduct serious oil spill response and cleanup? And that’s assuming they actually succeed in sucking the oil out of this wreck.
While the Canadian Coast Guard and their Dutch spill-recovery company fiddle around with the Zalinski, the real and more pressing issue of oil-spill response capabilities continues to build with the onset of winter weather and the looming decision by the National Energy Board.
The waters just to the south of Grenville Channel have been listed by Environment Canada as the fourth most-dangerous body of water in the world, with recorded waves close to 30 metres high. This is where a major shipping disaster would most likely take place. It is here that Canada will have to prove its ability to respond to a disaster the size of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, or much greater.
Not in the quiet waters of Grenville Channel, 70 years late.
Ian McAllister is the executive director of Pacific Wild, a B.C.-based wildlife conservation organization.
