Dear Editor:
With all due respect to Keith Baldrey, I have to disagree with the characterization of the Houston-based corporation Kinder Morgan as "touting a good safety record" in his recent article, One of These Pipelines is not Like the Other (June 15, North Shore News).
For starters, it is disingenuous for Kinder Morgan to take credit for the Trans Mountain pipeline's safety record in the period before they owned it. The pipeline was built long before it was bought by Kinder Morgan CEO Richard Kinder and his partner Bill Morgan; their company bought the Trans Mountain pipeline in 2005, when it was already 60 years old.
So what about Kinder Morgan's safety record since then? Most people in B.C. remember the oil spill in Burnaby in 2007, for which Kinder Morgan was recently found liable in court, but that hasn't been the only incident on this line in the short time they have owned it.
The year Kinder Morgan bought the pipeline there was a significant spill at a storage facility on Sumas Mountain which released approximately 210,000 litres of oil into a local creek. Another spill took place at the same location last year, leading resident to keep children indoors for fear of airborne toxins. Not long after that, there was a fire and explosion at the Cherry Point refinery, which is serviced by the same line. There was also a leak at the company's Burnaby Mountain storage tank in 2009, and the pipeline was briefly shut off that summer when spilled oil was reported close to the Alberta border.
The bottom line is that transporting oil is a dangerous business, and no one can claim to be able to do it without incident. It's important to know about a company's history, but even if they had been lucky enough not to have any major incidents, it still wouldn't make this new pipeline a good idea.
Just because Kinder Morgan bought an old existing pipeline that has largely been used to serve our local consumption over the last half century doesn't mean they should get the green light to build a new pipeline to export oil along the same route. This route could go through the fields and backyards of many people across the Fraser Valley and the Lower Mainland, in areas far more heavily populated than when the pipeline was first built.
If the folks at Kinder Morgan think they will have an easier time getting this pipeline built than the Enbridge pipeline, they are sorely mistaken.
Ben West, Healthy Communities Campaigner for the Wilderness Committee.
