VANCOUVER—Over the last four and half years, 94 of 176 tankers and barges that left Kinder Morgan’s Westridge Marine Terminal travelled down the Pacific coast stopping in Washington state, Oregon and California putting coastal economies and marine life in both countries at risk from an oil spill, a new report by Greenpeace U.S.A. says.

While the report says most oil transported by the Trans Mountain pipeline continues south to Washington state via the Puget Sound Pipeline, between nine and 27 per cent is transported by tankers and barges down the coast or across to Asia.

“With every one of those transports comes significant risks, both to coastal economies and to marine populations,” said Mike Hudema, a climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace Canada.

“Those risks just become exponential if the expansion plan goes through,” he said. “We’re talking about 400 tankers every single year, basically turning the entire west coast into a tanker superhighway.”

But Trans Mountain says the proportion of ships carrying oil from the Westridge Marine Terminal along that tanker highway would remain small even after the pipeline expansion. Currently, they make up less than 2 per cent of the tanker traffic in the Salish Sea, the company said in a statement.

Trans Mountain added that it has loaded marine vessels with petroleum since 1956 without a spill from tanker operations.

Last week, Jonathan Wilkinson, the parliamentary secretary to Environment Minister Catherine McKenna, addressed spill concerns while speaking in Vancouver about new efforts to protect endangered killer whales, negatively affected by ship noise, with Transport Minister Marc Garneau.

He pointed to the $1.5-billion Oceans Protection Plan, which included new measures and investments to prevent and help clean up any spills, and noted all tankers must now be double-hulled and towed further from the terminal into open water than previously required.

The government is also adding five new spill-response stations in southern B.C. and the Coast Guard will get new towing vessels to help get ships out of dangerous situations faster, according to Fisheries and Oceans Canada.

Garneau added that every tanker is inspected by Transport Canada on its first visit to a Canadian harbour and every year after that.

But there’s a 10 to 29 per cent risk that a tanker will spill more than 100,000 barrels of oil in the next 50 years, the Greenpeace report notes.

And a major spill would have considerable impacts on the coastal economies in B.C. where more than 320,000 people in the Lower Mainland work in industries that rely on a clean marine environment, and in the U.S. states of Washington, Oregon and California. Their combined $60-billion coastal economies support 150,000 jobs in commercial fishing plus more than 525,000 tourism jobs, the report says.

Alongside lost economic opportunities, the clean up costs could range from $1.2 billion in Vancouver to more than $10 billion in Washington, the report says.

“Over the last few days we’ve seen the dangers that oil transportation poses,” Hudema said, noting two recent oil spills.

In one case, a train carrying crude oil from Alberta derailed in Iowa spilling an estimated 870,619 litres of crude oil. In Rotterdam, Netherlands, meanwhile, the BBC reported that a tanker crashed into the port spilling 220 tonnes, or 220,000 litres, of oil into the harbour contaminating hundreds of swans, geese and other birds.

According to Transport Canada industry would be responsible for the costs of cleanup, the damage caused by the pollution, and for compensating other industries or communities for any losses in the event of a spill.

If the spill is from a ship then the ship owner would be responsible, the department said in a statement.

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But the case of the MV Marathassa illustrates the challenges of enforcing those rules.

The ship spilled an estimated 2,700 litres of bunker fuel into Vancouver’s English Bay in April 2015. Three years later the City of Vancouver is still trying to recover the half a million dollars it spent cleaning it up.

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