Oil spill response crews prepare for the worst

Crews tasked with cleaning up oil spills in B.C's waters were out on the water on Wednesday preparing strategies on how to respond to oil spills in areas that need protection first. 

"​The idea behind it is that we are identifying coastal sensitives ahead of a spill," said Michael Lowry with Western Canada Marine Response Corporation.

"A sensitivity could be an environmental sensitivity or could be a cultural sensitivity. Today we are focusing on cultural sensitivities at Stanley Park that have been identified by the local First Nations," Lowry said. 

After plotting out locations that will need protection first, crews dropped booms and sought out the best places to anchor them — be it on a tree, rock or infrastructure — they then captured and logged the information. 

"Having this information ahead of time allows us to have a quick rapid response," said Jocelyn Gardner, a response readiness supervisor with WCMRC. 

"These strategies we are developing are really useful for that first 72 hours," Gardner said. 

WCMRC was the same company tasked with cleaning up the English Bay oil spill in April 2015 where 2,700 litres of bunker C fuel spilled from the cargo ship MV Marathassa. 

The response time to that spill was criticized for being too slow when it came to notifying the city and clean up crews, and experts called it "disappointing" and "embarrassing."

Even though, today's procedure wasn't carried out for that spill — because it was too small and was heading west out of English Bay — it's supposed to help speed up response time if a bigger spill happens in the future.

"It gives you a snapshot of what your sensitives are in the area, what kind of equipment you need to protect them, how many people you need ... so a lot of your pre-planning is done in a quick two-page format," said Gardner.

This protection strategy is only part of the spill response protocol but happens simultaneously with containment, in which a team will use a boom to wrap the vessel that is polluting, and recovery, where the team recovers the oil that has already escaped the vessel.

So far, the organization has produced nearly 400 protection strategies for B.C.'s coasts.