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Oil in the watershed Creeks, wildlife pay the price for aging heating oil tanks on Saanich properties
Kyle Slavin Reporting
L
ike an unruly mob, a pack of Grade 4 and 5 students from Marigold elementary eagerly crowd around Barrie Goodwin as he pulls a 12-pound coho out of a large cooler at his feet. The kids immediately reach out to pet the salmon – a dead four-year-old male – but Goodwin turns away, shielding the fish from the group. “We don’t want you smelling like fish the rest of the day,” he exclaims. Standing at the shoreline of the Colquitz River, Goodwin and Chris Bos, both stream stewards, give the students a joint historyscience lesson on the salmonbearing river. “We’ve been learning about the connection between stormwater runoff and the quality of our streams and rivers, and I’m noticing we’re near a giant parking lot and a huge highway,” says teacher Marnie Toh. “Can you tell us, is that an issue in this creek?” Calling it “an issue” would be an understatement, given the Colquitz’s past year.
Sharon Tiffin/News staff
Marigold elementary teacher Liz Belanger gives a 12 pound coho salmon a smooch at Colquitz River. Students learn about the health of the salmon-bearing watershed from volunteer stewards. It was on Nov. 25, 2011 that Saanich discovered a 1,100-litre home heating oil spill on Kenneth Avenue. Most of that fuel had already flowed into a storm drain and polluted Colquitz River, Colquitz Creek and Swan Creek. The Colquitz stewards, who had spent the previous two months counting the 252 Coho that swam up the creek to spawn, dismantled their fish counting fence behind Tillicum Centre in the hopes that the fish in the oilsoaked water would swim down-
stream back into the Gorge and escape the polluted area. In the days following, 24 adult salmon were found dead in the river. Then on Feb. 23, 2012, the Colquitz was polluted again when another home heating tank leaked, this time spilling 630 litres of oil into the river near Vanalman Avenue. And just last week, B.C. Hydro took responsibility for an oily sheen on the Colquitz River after mineral oil from a power cable leaked into the waterway.
“If we’re going to keep the fish and wildlife values for you and your kids in the future, we need to be careful that we don’t pollute these creeks,” Bos tells the students. “If the storm water isn’t clean ... we will have a problem – we will lose these values in the future.” Adriane Pollard, Saanich’s manager of environmental services, says home heating spills of the last 12 months have been an eyeopening lesson for the municipality. Including the two big spills
in the Colquitz, there were eight known home heating oil spills in Saanich since February 2011. “Most of the time, we don’t hear about the spills – they’re small, contained and they’re cleaned up well,” Pollard says. “The difference is when you get a spill that leaves a property and heads to the nearest creek. For a period of time (this year) we had a great increase in the number of those spills.” And those sorts of spills are likely going to continue, says Victoria-Swan Lake MLA Rob Fleming, who walked the Colquitz with Bos last week to see how the river is doing one year after that first big spill. “These oil tanks really are just ticking time bombs,” says Fleming, the NDP’s environment critic. “What we’re seeing is that where there are areas of provincial responsibility, we have strong laws around enforcing cleanups. But there is a real gap on the prevention side.” That statement is loudly echoed by Bos and Pollard, as well as Coun. Vicki Sanders, who chairs Saanich’s environmental advisory committee. Educating homeowners on the risks associated with aging oil tanks and fuel lines is crucial in minimizing the number of these spills, they say. “We know there are probably 9,000 oil tanks in Saanich – and that’s probably a conservative estimate. We’re seeing no co-operation from insurance or the oil companies to help us find them, because that would make it very simple for us to notify everybody who owns an oil tank – but that’s not happening,” Sanders says. PLEASE SEE: Colquitz, Page A25
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