Dear Editor:
Re: The letter "A watery slalom for tankers to navigate", May 14.
My wife and I lived in Kitimat for four years, from 1993 to 1997. Before our arrival we bought a 32-foot boat to use cruising the inland waters adjacent to Kitimat and to make probably more than 50 trips from Kitimat to the ocean to fish for salmon and halibut. While the author of the letter may have looked at maps and viewed TV programs describing the area, I can state from personal experience that navigating the Douglas Channel from Kitimat to the Pacific presents no problems for a modern oil or LNG tanker.
The channel is wide and deep. After leaving Douglas Channel you enter Whale Channel, which is even wider and stays wide all the way to the ocean. Those who wish to provide the public with an assessment of the hazards of navigating this route should at least have been there.
My wife and I would often spend the weekend near the ocean, anchored out in one of the beautiful bays and coves in the area. The overwhelming sense of the place was loneliness. We would have welcomed an occasional tanker as a sign of civilization and a potential source of help should we encounter an emergency.
There may be good reasons to oppose the transportation of bitumen from Alberta to Kitimat and then to the Pacific Rim countries. But the idea that tankers will encounter hazardous conditions on the route to the Pacific Ocean from Kitimat is not one of them.
Dan Potts
West Vancouver
