MONTREAL – Until a Canada Steamship Lines vessel heading into the Port of Montreal ran aground near Ste. Catherine and ruptured its fuel tank Monday night, there had never been an oil spill in the St. Lawrence Seaway’s 51-year history.
But if an accident of this nature had to occur, it appears the circumstances that surrounded Monday’s spill of between 50 and 200 tonnes of the heavy crude-like oil that was being used to fuel the M/V Richelieu couldn’t have been better.
The vessel, which was loaded with 25 metric tonnes of wheat -not crude oil -was just upstream of a lock at the South Shore town of Ste. Catherine when it lost power during a flash storm and went off course to the channel’s rock wall and ran aground, officials said yesterday.
The fortuitous location meant that the oil that did leak from the vessel’s ruptured fuel tank before it was capped early yesterday is mostly contained in the Ste. Catherine lock, where the vessel is now moored and oil recuperation efforts are under way.
"It is a closed canal in which only ships transit," explained Jack Meloche, the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corp.’s regional manager of operations and one of several officials on site yesterday. "The water can’t go anywhere."
Meloche said all the oil that leaked is being contained by the lock’s gate on the east and by bright yellow boons installed across the navigational channel on the west.
Residents living in municipalities that rely on the St. Lawrence for drinking water have no reason to worry, said Yvan Tremblay, Environment Quebec’s emergency measures coordinator in the Eastern Townships and Monteregie.
"There are no public health issues," Tremblay said, noting that the municipalities are being constantly updated. "It’s not an ecological catastrophe -we have to keep things in context."
The cleanup is expected to take at least two days, and the shipping lane will not reopen until the Canadian Coast Guard issues an all-clear and Transport Canada gives the okay for ships to travel again.
As of late yesterday, five ships -one in Beauharnois, two in Ste. Catherine, one in St. Lambert and one in the Port of Montreal -were put on hold, and that number is expected to increase. About 10 ships go through the seaway each day.
But oil recuperation efforts are under way as is the cleanup of the affected shoreline, mostly localized to Ste. Catherine, said Sonia Laforest, an emergency operations official with Environment Canada.
She asked residents to avoid the Ste. Catherine shoreline, a popular spot with local fishermen, until the cleanup is completed.
Meanwhile, Canada Steamship Lines has committed to pay for the cleanup, the cost of which remains unknown, company officials said yesterday.
"CSL is going to take full responsibility for the incident and cleanup of the shores, no question," said Claude Dumais, CSL’s vice-president of technical operations.
Still, given the monumental environmental damage in the Gulf of Mexico that has played across television screens since April, officials recognized that there will be public concerns that need to be addressed in the coming days.
Although contained, Monday night’s spill has raised the question: What is the chance of a major oil spill in the St. Lawrence Seaway?
The possibility wasn’t quashed entirely yesterday, but experts noted that crude oil normally doesn’t travel up and down the special shipping channel between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes.
"There’s not much crude oil at all being transported by ships on the seaway," said Guy Robitaille, who is director of operations of the Montreal Pipe Line Ltd., which operates crude-oil pipelines between Montreal and the Atlantic seaport of Portland, Me.
Last year, about three per cent of all cargo that used the shipping lane -1.31 million metric tonnes -were petroleum products, said Meloche of theSt. LawrenceSeaway Management Corp.
Most crude oil in North America is transported by pipeline. The U.S. Midwest relies heavily on crude transported by pipeline through Chicago, and Ontario’s major refinery, in Sarnia, is fed by pipelines from Western Canada, and as well as from a pipeline from Montreal via Portland.
Meloche also pointed out that the double-hulled vessels that use the seaway today bring with them a reduced risk of leakage, which was not the case in the 1970s when the only other spill of note, a tar spill from a tankard carrying asphalt, took place near the U.S. lock at Massena, N.Y.
There are about 3,000 ships that pass through the St. Lawrence Seaway every year.
David Johnston of The Gazette contributed to this report
ccornacchia@thegazette.canwest.com
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