Americas News
Call for Ship Owners to Pay for Oil Spill Clean Ups And Compensation
Vancouver, Canada, has asked for by-law legislation to be prepared, protecting the city from the fiscal impact of an oil spill and making sure ship owners bear the full cost of any incident.
If Mayor Gregor Robertson's plans are passed, ship owners would have to have liability insurance sufficient to cover the clean up costs of any spill, plus compensation including loss of business in tourism, development and fisheries.
Exactly what a 'worst case' spill bill for ship owners might amount to is difficult to know, but Mr Robertson said, "The impact on the existing local economy of a major oil spill would be enormous".
“The Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 is over $2.5 billion in impact and counting, and that spill was nowhere near a major city with hundreds of thousands of jobs,” he said.
The action is widely seen as a move in opposition to Kinder Morgan’s plan to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline which delivers Canadian tar sands oil from Alberta to the Westridge Marine Terminal in the city of Burnaby immediately to the east of Vancouver.
The pipeline expansion would see daily throughput increase from 300,000 barrels to 850,000 barrels per day, and according to the Mayor's motion, that would boost tanker traffic five fold in Vancouver's coastal area to roughly a vessel per day.
It also calls for a "co-ordinated local government" response to oppose any increase in tanker traffic, saying the increase “poses an unacceptable and unmitigated risk to Vancouver's economy and environment.”
The fact that the waters in which the vessels pass are federally controlled means that once again, the West Coast has raised the question of whether local Government has the authority to pass such legislation.
In 2007, maritime legislation put forth by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) was challenged in court by the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association (PMSA) and eventually determined by the courts to be preempted by the federal Clean Air Act.
CARB's 2009 rewrite of the regulations, focusing on the fuel used by vessels rather than on emission standards, was again met with legal action from the PMSA but was ultimately upheld.
The shipping group, which represents a majority of the shipping lines calling at North American West Coast ports, has no objection to the environmental goals of CARB's efforts but believes nationwide and international regulations are needed to tackle maritime pollution, not a patchwork of regulations that potentially differ from state to state.
