The Western Canada Marine Response Corp. will be simulating a response to an oil spill in Burrard Inlet this week.
“We’re going to bring our 250-foot barge up from Ioko and we’ll be deploying boom off of that vessel and our dedicated oil spill response vessels will be supporting that operation, so they’ll be deploying boom as well as skimmers,” said Michael Lowry, WCMRC spokesman.
The vessels and booms will be operating about 500 metres off Cates Park Tuesday through Thursday.
The exercise is part of a regularly scheduled regimen required to train new contractors. Under federal law, the agency must also demonstrate its ability to respond to a 10,000-tonne spill every three years, a 2,500-tonne spill every two years and a 100-tonne spill yearly.
While an aframax tanker, the type used to move oil from the terminus of Kinder Morgan’s pipeline in Burnaby, has a capacity 80,0000 tonnes, a 10,0000-tonne spill is considered the worst-case scenario because that is the capacity of each compartmentalized hold aboard a double-hulled tanker.
WCMRC can respond to a spill of 26,000 tonnes with mutual aid agreements in place with oil spill response agencies in Washington and Alaska, should the need arise, Lowry said.
