Burrard Inlet Pollution

[SpringFever2359]

A portrait of pollution around the Port of Vancouver | The Narwhal

Tsleil-Waututh Nation is intent on rewriting provincial policy to protect Burrard Inlet from industrial waste. But a leaked video of a coal spill illustrates the challenges with enforcement

thenarwhal.ca

 

[Whole in the Water]

ENGO's and DFO don't like to talk about it much but this is a big part of what is killing the SRKW as the toxins in the JDF, Salish Sea and Puget Sound build up in their fat over the decades. Many of the SRKW are heavily polluted.

 

[Brett83]

What's crazy is the boat yard at mosquito creek. You sand and paint your boat on a tarp, then is rains and everything off your tarp goes into the mosquito creek estuaries. I called the guy out on it, he asked if I was an environmentalist and didn't care. It's like the wild west down there. But they're shutting down anyway.

 

[Max123]

In such a compact urban area, it would be great if the Port / DFO / Municipalities got together to install real-time monitoring hardware at all major culverts/discharge points into burrard inlet. This is totally feasible, and the technology exists (in fact, municipalities such as Coquitlam and Burnaby already do this on some sensitive streams). The next step would be to host the data publicly so that it is open to researchers / interested parties - then you would start to see public pressure mount to deal with offenders, on an evidence basis.

There are a lot of ugly truths about storm water discharge that people don't like to think about. Its great if we can get a refinery to stop/reduce permitted dumping - but in a lot of cases the data lifts the veil on things you never even knew about. Maybe you find that there is a ton of contamination traced back to some unknown historic chemical dump, or a leaking sewer main somewhere, etc, etc. The things that kill you are often the things you never even knew about. Take the example of tire/rubber particles and the impact on salmon mortality. No one was even talking about this until a few researchers started looking into it a few years ago. I still don't see any effective plan for action to deal with this.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/chemical-salmon-deaths-1.7108014

Without data no one knows - is it discharge from the refinery, tire rubber washing off the road, some old leaking sanitary service, stream warming caused by climate change? Without data, who knows - and a broad census of discharge points into the inlet would provide the evidence for real, effective action. Otherwise, its just guesswork .