BURNABY, B.C.—Local residents living downhill from the Trans Mountain oil tank farm on Burnaby Mountain say their fears have escalated after two experts alleged the Crown corporation’s oil storage towers — built 65 years ago — might not withstand an earthquake on B.C.’s coast.

Trans Mountain Corp., meanwhile, is rejecting the claims, and stressing the safety measures that will be in place.

In a report released Tuesday, a Simon Fraser University earth sciences professor and a retired structural engineer sounded the alarm about what they contend are serious flaws of a handful of the facility’s oldest tanks.

“The sloshing after an earthquake would create wave actions against the tank sides, and, if it broke, any spark would ignite it,” retired structural engineer Gordon Dunnet told StarMetro Vancouver on Tuesday. “It would be a moving fire of astounding magnitude.”

The pair alleged there are enough potential dangers of an oil breach catching fire and flowing into a 30,000-resident neighbourhood and school to warrant an independent engineering study before the federal government proceeds with the pipeline’s expansion.

“The actual risk of a big, magnitude-7 earthquake is quite low, but it’s not zero,” said geoscientist John Clague, professor in SFU’s Department of Earth Sciences, in front of the tank facility Tuesday.

“But we do get closer magnitude-6 quakes typically every 30 years or so, and you can get moderate ground motions that would be quite damaging in the Vancouver area.

“I look at it, in my world, as a low-probability event, but the consequences are enormous; the risk is off the scale. This problem could be addressed, it’s not responsible to not look at it.”

Trans Mountain Corp., which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government bought last summer for $4.5 billion from Texas firm Kinder Morgan, said it has conducted thorough reviews of the aging, floating-roof tanks and submitted its findings to the National Energy Board, which later recommended the project proceed.

“In 65 years of operation, we’ve never had a storage tank fire or structural incident with one of our tanks,” a company spokesperson said in an email. “Although tank fires and seismic tank incidents worldwide are extremely rare, our prevention and emergency management programs are an integral part of keeping our terminals operating safely.”

Tuesday’s report suggested concerns with several of the oldest tanks on the site, which have roofs that float to whatever level they are filled with petroleum products.

The Trans Mountain pipeline carries a mix of different fuel types, and if expanded would increase the amount of diluted bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands nearly threefold to 890,000 barrels a day to the Westridge Marine Terminal below the company’s tank farm.

“I’m sure their new tanks will be build to standard,” said report co-author Dunnet. “But it’s these older ones that are a real concern.

“This facility needs to be looked at for the risk of a strong earthquake.”

The new assertions follow concerns raised by the Burnaby Firefighters Association several years ago, and tby he city’s new mayor and former fire official Mike Hurley, about fire risks to Burnaby residents and a nearby elementary school.

For two local residents StarMetro Vancouver spoke with Tuesday, the seismic concerns have only heightened long-standing fears about the tank farm, even before the proposal to expand the pipeline.

“There’s all kinds of issues,” said David Huntley, 83, an SFU emeritus physics professor, as he walked with a cane through the Burnaby Conservation Area near Trans Mountain’s facilities.

As a neighbour just blocks from the tank farm, he said his greatest concern isn’t oil flow but inhaling the chemicals, including benzene, that are used to dilute the thick bitumen to allow it to flow by pipe.

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“If you have one of these huge fires, they have to evacuate people from kilometres away,” Huntley said. “I’m certainly within that evacuation zone, but I’m more worried about smoke from the fire.”

He remembers his own neighbourhood’s 2007 bitumen spill when huge quantities of heavy oil spewed into the air when a construction crew accidentally punctured a tank.

The authors of the report on seismic risks admitted the risk of an earthquake imminently is very low, but with the Pacific Northwest region sitting on an active seismic zone — and a massive megathrust earthquake overdue off the coast, according to geologists — they called for a federal rethink of the project, or at very least replacing the oldest tanks.

In response to a question about how likely an earthquake big enough to damage the tanks is, Dunnet said it’s “unlikely” but significant. And independent of the temblor’s direct damage, it can also make the ground can move sideways and the oil can behind to move inside the tank, adding to the structures’ weaknesses, he said.

For Burnaby North’s federal NDP candidate and former member of Parliament Svend Robinson, who hosted a news conference about the report’s allegations Tuesday, the federal ownership of the project simply increases its responsibility to protect Canadian citizens.

He demanded an independent seismic review, not commissioned by the company as was the previous National Energy Board submission, and for scrapping the project altogether for both safety concerns and climate reasons.

“Not only are these creating a serious risk to our community from the existing tank farm,” Robinson told reporters, “but the suggestion there be an expansion by 14 more tanks side-by-side with these 1953 tanks poses unacceptable risks that would be devastating to our community.”

But the company denied the report’s claims that the tanks might not withstand a massive temblor, as well as their allegations such a spill or its potential fire couldn’t be contained by firefighters.

It described “stringent safety standards,” as well as systems to detect any fires quickly and suppress them. When its expansion is complete, Trans Mountain said, part of that will include enlarging the water reservoir for fires, high-capacity fire-suppressing foam systems and seismic reports on the existing tanks.

“As knowledge about seismic events has improved, upgrades have been completed at our facilities and along our pipeline system, including Burnaby Terminal, to address seismic hazards,” the company said.

For local resident Huntley, the “danger” he feels from a burning oil river has few parallels in his life. But asked to compare how threatened he feels his life is, he recalled being in an area of the U.K. bombed by Germany during the Second World War when he was a child.

“We had a bomb actually land in a field right by our house,” he said. “Of course, the most dangerous thing is just driving down the highway — but as far as an external event, there’s aren’t many other dangers like this.”

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