More on tanker safety — from someone who really knows what they’re talking about.

A day or so back I posted up a few of my thoughts on the federal announcement about a new tanker-safety strategy.

Aside from the bit of bumph in the general news media analysing the “new” federal approach, I found one really good analysis — really, really good — that summed up the problems with the Tories’ attempt to assure the West Coast, and Canadians in general, that the prospect of a huge bump in marine bitumen transport can all be dealt with safely.

Being a tech idiot on  lots of issues, I was struggling with how to link the post to my blog from its site on Facebook so you could all read it.

Luckily, the full text has popped up on the very clever Tidal Station blog here.

I had one single point to make about Harper’s plan — and that was that no amount of regulation works if they aren’t the right regulations, and you don’t enforce them. Which sums up a lot of present maritime regs.

But this great post, by Dave Tyre, addresses the entire safety proposal point by point.

It’s hugely worth a read.

BC Ferries asked its engineers to share their feelings. Their response? We’ll never know.

Wow. You can only imagine how … what’s the word … hair-raising the feedback was when BC Ferries asked its fleet engineers to take part in an “employee engagement” exercise a year after the company wrestled a herd of about 150 workers — including about 80 senior engineers — out of the unionized workforce and into the ranks of management.

At least I’m guessing it was hair-raising, given the amount of material that was whited-out in the company’s 72-page response to an FOI request for records of the responses that the company’s “listeners team” received last year as the exercise unfolded.

Not a single individual response or email from among the many cited is readable — including a summary chart of “the good, the bad and the ugly” comments.

I gather the exercise was meant as a sort of morale-booster for engineers angry and stressed after the company won a lengthy, aggressive push late in 2010 to have a number of engineers excluded from the union and classed as managers.

The excluded engineers, mostly senior officers, said both before and after the ruling they were afraid that without the protection of the union, they would be constrained from speaking out about professional concerns on important matters like public safety and environmental issues.

Through another professional mariners’ group, they issued a statement that said: “The world is awash in disasters resulting from risky cost-cutting measures, dangers of pollution, unsafe practices, hazards and myriad other problems which are most apparent to those whose job and skills are focused on monitoring these matters on the scene, on an hourly basis, in this case, below deck. BC Ferries senior engineers want to retain this role.”

It looks like the BC Ferry and Marine Workers Union filed a Freedom of Information request to the company asking for records of how the remaining engineers said they were feeling about their “work situations” when the company rolled out its listening exercise after the exclusion ruling. (I’m guessing the exercise was rolled out pretty much directly in response to the ongoing unhappiness that arose from the exclusion, but that’s just a guess.)

There are two pages of material that haven’t been redacted.

One offers up a “David Letterman’s top 10 (food for thought)”, which looks like a summary of suggestions that were made, although it’s very abbreviated and fairly hard to parse. Some of them are fairly clear, and I quote:

  • A mechanism or structure to model the way for connectedness with Atrium (ie headquarters of the company). Engineers’ advisory council???
  • Roadmap to create and maintain a trusting people to people (midlevel manager) Interface to foster a win win relationship.
  • Engineering to continue with efforts in eliminating criticism, complain, and condemnation from workplace.
  • A need to enforce undertaking of honest and effective listening as biweekly/monthly ritual by frontline managers.
  • 3rd engineer/Second officer pay disparity is a bleeding point among all Engineers.
  • A myth buster and an ombudsman.

There’s also something marked “Scorecard” that grades how crew feel about things like meaningful work, fairness and recognition.

The scores (and again, I quote):

  • Meaningful Work: Pass
  • Autonomy (an environment where people have the tools, training, support and authority to make decisions): need to work on it.
  • Collaboration: Pass
  • Connectedness to Leader: Very hard work ahead beyond immediate supervisor.
  • Fairness: Work hard to establish
  • Recognition: Practice hard to establish
  • Career Growth: Fail

So that gives you some idea how the love-in went.

BC Ferries says it cost the company $1,037.87 to put the information together. It charged the union $108.50 of that as a processing fee.

That means the company, which you and I and our government own, ate the rest of the cost to produce a bunch of blank paper that obscured not only the names, contact numbers and emails of workers (which is fair), but also the actual information they passed along about their working conditions (which seems bizarre for a publicly owned company to do).

All I’m hoping at this point is that whatever concerns, stress and problems that were created by the exclusion of the engineering officers are being dealt with honestly and effectively — because the company isn’t likely to undo the move, and the remaining engineers have to show up and do their jobs every day, and the rest of us need to rely on a public transportation system that is run by crew who are provided an appropriate workplace in which to exercise the skills that keep our ferries in safe operating shape.

I’m also hoping that the officers’ predictions that safety would be put at risk have fallen mercifully short of the mark.

Right?

Here’s what would really make tanker traffic safer: Political will. And rules that mean something.

I expect there will be mixed reaction to yesterday’s  federal announcement of a new safety regime for oil tankers sailing  Canadian waters.

It won’t be enough for most people opposing development or expansion of oil activity off our coast. It might be enough for anyone on the fence, though, and it will undoubtedly be enough to encourage those who want to build pipelines and boost oil exports to renew their campaigns with fresh enthusiasm. (Yes, I’m lookin’ at you, Premier “Five Conditions Including A World-Class Oil Response“.)

My own reaction? Nice start, and better than what we have now.

But none of it — none of it — is going to mean anything if the new regulations are enforced with the same half-hearted effort as most of our current maritime regs. Or if as many exemptions to them are granted. Or if enforcement of them is as underfunded. Or if they end up being as watered down under pressure from industry.

I’m still busy reading the proposed new regulatory regime  that was tabled along with yesterday’s announcement.

Some of the plan looks good to me, off the top — the use of two pilots on tankers, for example, presuming that we continue to train them up and maintain a good supply of qualified folks. And the appointment of Gordon Houston to chair the safety review panel is probably as good as it is going to get, all things considered. Houston is at least a mariner, and ran a positively open and upfront port in Vancouver when he was CEO, compared to the administrations that followed him.

Otherwise, the plan calls for increased tanker inspections, more aerial surveillance of ships (good god, how many times can we re-announce that one?),  a review of pilotage and tug-escort requirements, more research on non-conventional petroleum products like diluted bitumen, more ports, starting with Kitimat, designated for traffic-control measures, stronger requirements for pollution prevention and response at oil-handling facilities, new offences for contraventions of the act and greater pollution penalties.

But back to my point: I do have an important thought about tanker safety that is going undebated as this whole issue is dissected and chewed over.

It’s an argument that stuck with me through years spent covering maritime issues on this coast as a journalist, and it’s an argument I make often to environmentalists who use maritime issues as part of their platform opposing oil development, movement and export.

It goes something like this:

I get the climate change argument, I get the overall carbon issue, I get the pipeline safety concerns. I understand the economic debate about using, or not using, resource revenue to fund other programs we depend on, and I’ve spent hours looking at the national arguments for a cross-Canada pipeline.

When all that is said and done, and the focus finally turns to the specific issue of the safety challenges posed by a massive boost in the number of tankers sailing our coast — and in particular, in and out of Kitimat, and those challenging stretches of water — then I start asking a question that no one seems to want to talk about.

My question is always about making the maritime traffic we have now as safe as possible.

I argue, and I believe, that we should take some small sliver of the considerable time, money and energy that is put into fighting tanker traffic and redirect it to fight against the ongoing knee-capping of Canada’s present regulatory regime and enforcement and investigation system.

Fight your other fight about the future, but pay a little attention to the reality in front of you now, that’s what I mean.

The point? If this really is about the safety of the environment, then surely the environment matters now.

And surely the lack of, oh, what’s the word … vigour with which Canada’s present maritime regulations are enforced is something that should be addressed.

Because if it was addressed, then our waters, and the people and goods who work and travel on those tugs, ferries, freighters, cruiseships and fish boats would be safer now. And that would be a good thing.

And if we took the position now that regulations do matter, and that sufficient workers will always be kept in place to enforce them, and that we will exercise massive political will to stare down and punish anyone trying to weaken them or avoid complying, then we could move forward with a discussion of new tanker safety regulations with some sense that there was … how to put it … a point to the discussion.

Here are a couple of examples of what I mean.

One involves the horrible death of an officer killed in the port of Vancouver several years ago when a berthing line on his ship snapped, hit him and flipped him across the deck. The issue is known as the “human factor”, one of the deadliest and most common causes of accidents at sea. Investigators concluded that the death was an unfortunate accident and the man had simply made a bad decision about where to stand as the ship was being “walked” forward so the cargo could be dumped into another hold. They said he stood looking over a curved bow that prevented him from seeing the danger of a line that could snap. I covered the case. I talked to other inspectors who told me that the “rest books” on the ship weren’t up to date. (Those are the logs that record how many hours crew and officers have worked, because there are international regulations about that — the same way we keep our roads safe by limiting the hours that commercial truckers can drive at one time.) I don’t know if the man who was killed had been up too long and simply lost that basic, built-in seafarer’s sense that keeps them out of “the bight,” the dangerous area where something unforseen might hurt them. But I do know that he would have been up very long hours supervising the loading that was being done. And I know the books weren’t up to date, although they are required to be. And I know that fatigue at sea is an enormous problem in accidents. (The fight against fatigue was once proudly led, at the IMO, by Canada’s own Bill O’Neil. It’s still a critical issue; an international assault on fatigue at sea is planned for this year.) Those troubling, potentially connectable dots have weighed on my mind since the morning I got the call about the death. Because if we can’t enforce something as straightforward as hours of work, how do we keep operations safe?

Don’t like the fact that the Queen of the North sank in Wright Sound with 220,000 litres of diesel on board in a spot that made salvage virtually impossible? Well, that grounding would almost without question have been prevented if a third crew member had been on the bridge at the time that the two crew present were distracted by a personal conversation. Federal regulations in fact required a third person — but BC Ferries waged a long, aggressive argument against the requirement and sailed routinely without meeting it. I know; I spent months covering that issue, and I went through the entire record of private exchanges between the company and Transport Canada. (The issue is also covered in the Transportation Safety Board’s report on the sinking; the company, as the TSB notes, now sails that route with three crew on the bridge at all times.) So how about we start actually enforcing rules on things like manning? Because having “sufficient and efficient” crew, as they say, makes a difference to safety at sea.

Finally,  there’s the mother of all oily maritime disasters:  the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. Nobody wants another Exxon Valdez. You only have to mention the name to shut down any debate. But if you read the official investigation report into the accident and subsequent spill (and you should, it’s instructive), you’ll see how failing to enforce safe crewing and operations can be deadly.

Here’s what the National Transportation Safety Board said about the cause of the accident that spewed 258,000 barrels of oil when eight cargo tanks ruptured, caused “catastrophic damage to the environment” and $25 million in damage to the vessel, and cost $3.4 million in lost  cargo and $1.85 billion for cleanup during 1989 alone:

“Probable Cause:

“The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the grounding of the Exxon Valdez was the failure of the third mate to properly maneuver the vessel because of fatigue and excessive workload; the failure of the master to provide a proper navigation watch because of impairment from alcohol; the failure of Exxon Shipping Company to provide a fit master and a rested and sufficient crew for the Exxon Valdez; the lack of an effective Vessel Traffic Service because of inadequate equipment and manning levels, inadequate personnel training, and deficient management oversight; and the lack of effective pilotage services.”

What else is there to say?

It isn’t an argument for shutting down our coast.

Accidents happen.

That’s one reason we have governments — to create and enforce regulations that make commercial operations as safe as humanly possible.

Canada is a maritime nation. We’re not going to stop trading any time soon. We’d be a sorrier place without trade.

Whether or not the pipelines are built, whether or not tanker  traffic increases — hell, whether or not the existing commercial and recreational marine traffic ever increases — we can do a lot more to make our waters, our workers and our goods safe.

And there’s a mighty win to be had if even a fraction of the effort that’s going into this battle is redirected to joining hands on a second, winnable front: the battle to make regulations mean something.

We’ve lost a lovely Canadian

Bless you, Stompin’ Tom.

Rest in peace, somewhere over this beautiful country.

Initial results are in from ferry “consultation”. Results? About what you’d expect

The provincial government (we’re still calling it that, right?) has released initial results of its recent “consultation” with the public about how to fix the mess at BC Ferries.

I’m still reading through the part that’s been released.

But for now, you can find it here. Poke around the site; there’s some background if you need to catch up.

Looks like about what you’d expect, given the options that were presented, the questions asked and the fact it was done by a government counting down the clock to an uncertain election.

Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves below. I’ll weigh in when I get a minute to digest it all.

Front-row seats for the Kits base drama

Want a look at the bite that’s been taken out of the docks at the Kitsilano coast guard base?

Click here.

You can see the base itself on the pier that sticks out of the dark clump of trees right under the bright white dome in the centre of the shot. If you follow the pier out to its end, you’ll see gap to the left, and a bunch of pilings beside it. Those two things, the end of the dock and the pilings, used to be connected with a huge metal ramp and dock. Both of which I am told are now being moved to the coast guard’s hovercraft base in Richmond, to replace the ones there.

As of this morning, the old floats are gone too, the ones you used to walk along to get to the ships that tied up.

The webcam (which isn’t great, but it’s the only one I know of) is  updated every five minutes — which might be often enough for those who want to tune in and watch the slow, costly dismantling of the building that used to house Canada’s busiest base.

Kitsilano coast guard ramp heads south

UPDATE, FRIDAY MORNING: Divers are in the water at the Kits base now, prepping for dismantling of the floats where the fleet used to tie up, according to CG workers.

For everyone wondering about the huge metal ramp that was removed from the Kitsilano coast guard base Thursday, I’m told it is heading for the hovercraft station in Richmond to replace the one there.

Dave Clark, regional vice-president of the union representing coast guard workers, told reporters he thinks removal of the ramp and dock piece is just the first step, and that federal Fisheries Minister Keith Ashfield “has (issued) an order to demolish the building ASAP. This is definitely not about the safety of Vancouverites, it is about getting rid of a smear to their reputation.”

Clark is also warning that if the building comes down, the cleanup of the former national-defence site could be costly. The last department base cleanup in Germany cost $6 million, he told CKNW. There is some pollution likely at the site, where a concrete cap was laid after a fire in the 1990s took out the old base and the new metal building was erected. Remove that cap and, well, you might have a world of problems, Clark warns.

(CTV has a great story on the costs of closing down the base, including environmental cleanup, by the way.)

 I’ve spent a couple of days talking to a number of the folks who work in the service out here, so more on this later.

I don’t know if the base building is coming down. I assume Clark knows what he’s talking about. I’d like to see a copy of the lease between the province and the feds for the site, and I’d like to see a lot of the records a reporter with some appropriate curiosity and a little cash to burn might turn up on this whole closure decision. Who knows, maybe the requests have already been filed…

What I do know is that the closure isn’t about anything as simple as a land sale and a cash grab.

It’s part of a relentless march by the federal Tories, and the Liberals before them, to dismantle much of the actual service, not just its assets.

But more on that later.