Category: Risk assessment
A tale of two shipwrecks
One in Brittany, France, the other in Cape Breton, Canada. One cleaned up in a month, the other untouched after four, with no cleanup in sight.
Here’s the TK Bremen shortly after it grounded on Kerminihy Beach, near Erdeven, Brittany, France, on December 11. 2011.
And here’s the M/V Miner after it grounded on Scatarie Island, Cape Breton, after a towing cable parted on September 14, 2011.
The much larger Miner was under tow, bound for a scrapyard in Aliaga, Turkey. Here are the two ships’ specifications:
| M/V Miner | TK Bremen | |
| Launched | 1965 | 1982 |
| Type | Bulk carrier | General cargo & bulk carrier |
| Built in | Quebec, Canada | Pusan, South Korea |
| Length (LOA) | 222.5 m | 109 m |
| Beam | 23 m | 16 m |
| Draught | 8.2 m | 6.74 m |
| Gross tonnage | 17,831 | 3,992 |
| power | 8,000 bhp | 4,000 bhp |
| Shipwrecked on | Sept 20, 2011 | Dec 16, 2011 |
| Shipwrecked at | Scatarie Island, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada | Kerminihy Beach, Erdeven, Brittany, France |
| Flag | * | Malta |
| Owner | Pella Shipping Co., Thessaloniki, Greece | Blue Atlantic Shipping Ltd., Malta |
The Bremen was much more accessible than the Miner, having grounded on a mainland beach, while the Miner fetched up on remote, unpopulated, forbidding Scatarie Island. Though very different, the two areas share one thing in common besides shipwrecks: The dunes adjacent to Kerminihy Beach are a nature preserve, and Scatarie is a provincially protected wilderness area.
There the similarities end. As detailed in a photo spread on TheAtlantic.com website, 40 men worked day and night for two weeks to dismantle the Bremen and clean up the beach, at a cost of nearly €10 million euros (CDN$13.2 million).
“One month after the wreck,” reports The Atlantic, “the cleanup process is nearly complete.”
The French cleanup began:
The work continued:
Here’s all that remained of the TK Bremen as of Monday:
I won’t attempt to draw any lessons. I’m no expert, and the Miner is a much larger vessel in a much dicier location. But it may be worth noting that three weeks after the Miner went aground, NS Premier Darrell Dexter hadn’t been able to get any federal agency to take charge of the disaster. And I can’t recall any Canadian shipwreck being cleaned up the way France cleaned up the Bremen, let alone in two weeks flat.
Makes you wonder.
The website Boatnerd.com details numerous collisions, groundings, and accidents experienced by the Miner its previous incarnations as the Canadian Miner, the LeMoyne, and the Maplecliffe Hall. More information about the Miner here and here, and about the Bremen here, here, and here.
* According to Boatnerd, the Miner’s Canadian registry was cancelled last June. I was unable to determine its registry for the aborted trip to Turkey.
Donham’s Law of Fisheries Conservation reconfirmed
In an almost perfect illustration of Donham’s Law, the New York Times reports this morning that New English fishermen are pooh-poohing calls from fisheries scientists for greater restrictions, or even an outright ban, on cod fishing in the gulf of Maine.
The scientists point to new data showing cod stocks in much worse shape than previously thought; the fishermen say there’s an abundance of fish.
“Fishermen will almost always tell you that, and it’s not that they’re lying,” said Mark Kurlansky, whose 1997 book, “Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World,” documented how Canada’s once-abundant Atlantic cod were fished almost to extinction. “Landing a lot of fish can mean the fish are very plentiful, or it can mean the fishermen are extremely efficient in scooping up every last one of them.”
Donham’s Law of Fisheries Conservation states that All fishermen resolutely support conservation measures, except those targeting the species they fish for, and the gear types they fish with.
CBRM’s war on young people — a different view
Grad student, cultural activist, and entrepreneur Mike Targett writes:
I appreciate a lot of Jay Macneil’s general complaint. I’ve made similar ones about decision-makers not trying hard enough to make this place more livable, and even actively trying to make it less livable. I can even be pretty cynical about council at times. Maybe that cynicism is what made me think twice about this vote, since Morgan the populist voted with Kim Deveaux the radical. Curious.
Did Morgan vote for what he knew would be the popular sentiment (“All he wanted to do was dance!”) despite testimony from the Chief of Police that the dances were phenomenally unsafe? But that’s not all council voted on. There were two motions put forward on Tuesday, and it’s the second one that MacNeil ignores in his rant:
- Councillor Derek Mombourquette brought the motion to council to ban the dances, not because he hates young people (he practically is one), but because the Chief of Police told him the dances were a danger to the kids who attend and the police could no longer ensure their safety. I suspect that, after this police testimony, council probably couldn’t continue to allow the dances at municipally-owned buildings, as such, without being liable for what goes on. (Maybe why the schools stopped holding the dances in the first place.)
- Council then agreed to put resources into a committee made up of police, schools, decision-makers, and kids themselves, to come up with a way to create a safe environment for kids to have fun. (Or, I suppose, more realistically: ways to provide a reasonably safe environment.)
So if you take [1] and [2] together, council didn’t really ‘ban’ dances at this venue, they only suspended the dances until those dances can be made safe(r) for the kids who attend.
The schools, on the other hand, seem to believe the dances themselves were the problem… rather than alcohol, drugs, and violence being the problem. The schools seem to have said, ‘Ban dances, problem solved.’
All the schools solved was their own problem of liability. Whereas, if we give council the benefit of the doubt (I can’t believe I’m saying that), what they’re really saying is that the problem goes beyond the dances themselves, and that creating a safe and fun atmosphere for kids is the responsibility of the community (and should be a priority of the community).
So the community — especially the “people in this community who spend their entire day trying to find ways to inspire and engage the youth of their community” — should get behind the new committee [2] instead of blaming council for doing what they (likely) had to [1].
Sydney overkill and Beijing underkill
Earlier this week, various blogs and media outlets reported that Beijing was experiencing frightful levels of air pollution. To document the crisis, China hand James Fallows cited what he called “the indispensable (and highly controversial)” Twitter feed @Beijingair, which produces hourly readings of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Beijing. On Monday, @Beijingair showed readings in excess of 300 µg/m3, contributing to conditions the US EPA characterizes as “hazardous,” and warranting “health warnings of emergency conditions.”
What caught my attention was Fallows’s assertion that the @BeijingAir feed is “the only known source of PM 2.5 readings in China.” That is astounding: one PM2.5 meter for a nation of 1.3 billion people. By contrast, Sydney, Nova Scotia, population ~27,000,* has seven instruments that monitor PM2.5.
Bear with me for a brief technical digression. PM2.5 is a measure of the concentration of airborne particles smaller than 2.5 microns (millionths of a metre)—tiny particles that can find their way deep inside people’s lungs. It’s the air quality scientist’s indicator of choice for air pollution most likely to damage health.
To confound matters further, Sydney’s closely monitored air quality appears to be quite good. Here is the most recent publicly available data, from a 24-hour sample collected on October 12.
Each column represents a different monitoring station, each of which has two types of monitors. The highest reading among them was less than 1/1ooth of that registered this week in Beijing. These monitors run for 24 hours once every six days, a schedule that coincides with Canada’s National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) network. A seventh Sydney-based unit operates continuously and contributes data used to calculate Environment Canada’s Air Quality Health Index (AQHI), but the PM2.5 results are not reported separately.
This appears to be a clear case of underkill in Beijing, where much better data is warranted, and I would argue, overkill in Sydney, where air quality has been unremarkable by North American standards for the last two decades. Over-measurement in Sydney reflects the public panic over the Tar Ponds cleanup in the late ’90s and early ‘oughts. A few environmental activists persuaded residents that air-quality impacts from the Tar Ponds were putting their health at risk, a falsehood Environment Canada has been loathe to correct. Ironically, back before Sydney’s coke ovens closed in 1988, the city’s air likely did pose a health hazard, but went largely unmonitored.
The relative hazards of air quality in China vs. Nova Scotia show up clearly in this NASA map compiled from satellite readings of average PM2.5 levels around the world between 2001 and 2006:
I would ascribe both conditions — Sydney overkill and Beijing underkill — to the politicization of environmental monitoring. Back when Sydney’s polluting steel mill and coke ovens were the largest employer in a region short of jobs, few people wanted to hear about associated environmental concerns, and government was content to turn a blind eye. Similarly, the Chinese government is reluctant to highlight the environmental costs of its spectacular economic growth (although, as Fallows often points out, its environmental record is not so indifferent as some in the west assume).
In subsequent posts on Beijing air monitoring, Fallows has subtly adjusted his claim about @Beijingair’s putative uniqueness in China. He now describes it as “the only public readings of PM 2.5.” The controversial feed is based on an air monitoring unit on the roof of the US Embassy in Beijing. Official chinese annoyance over it was the subject of a Wikileaks cable, and may have contributed to the Chinese government decision to block access to Twitter in 2009. There are welcome early signs, here and here, that China may soon begin more appropriate monitoring. I would be surprised if they are not secretly monitoring PM2.5.
My point here is that citizens should take care to view environmental hazards in context, and always remain mindful that any chemical hazard is proportional to dose.
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*Sydney no longer exists as a municipal unit, having been amalgamated into the Cape Breton Regional Municipality in 1995. Wikipedia puts the “Sydney area” population in the 2006 census at 33,012, but this is suspiciously high. I was unable to ferret out local population numbers from StatsCan’s online census information, but will be delighted if readers can steer me to them.
Canadian cringe quote of the week — technology division
Jeff Jarvis speaking to Leo LaPorte on this week’s edition of This Week in Google:
I listen to Radio Canada — CBC — on Sirius all the time, because they have good programs, and they’re covering RIM like it’s really a story, ‘cause they have to, ‘cause it’s like a national requirement. It’s so sad.
Peter Rojas chimed in:
That company… Those two, the co-CEOs, should be fired. Those guys are in complete denial. Whatever they were able to lead the company to success before, they’re clearly not able to take it to where it needs to go now. They’re executing way too slowly, the products are not exciting, and I think they still completely overvalued their core asset which is basically how well Blackberries do email and the security stuff.
LaPorte:
I think that what they did not count on was that the employee would start choosing the handset, not the employer. I think that’s really what happened…. Employees said, “Nope, I’m not using that crappy phone. I’m using an iPhone.”
More on that Sydney Harbor silt plume
The Cape Breton Post’s Chris Shannon has a thorough and detailed account of Environment Canada’s failure to monitor or control rampant siltation from the Sydney Harbor dredging boondoggle project (first reported here).
In among the buck-passing and not-my-department quotes lies this gem:
The federal environmental screening assessment report is supposed to be posted online. But a check of each of the departments’ websites didn’t turn up the report.
A spokesperson for the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency said the screening report couldn’t be found on its agency’s website either since it doesn’t conduct that type of environmental assessment.
“It’s really the responsible authorities that are responsible for the mitigation measures, the follow-up programs, and that would all be detailed in the screening report,” Lucille Jamault said.
Did Ms. Jamault really say the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency has no responsibility to provide access to environmental assessments? Did she say it with a straight face?
The real problem here is the politicization of Environment Canada. Projects should not be subject to varying standards of environmental assessment, monitoring, and control simply because they are popular or politically useful to the government in power.
A contaminated silt plume no one seems concerned about
A 100-hectare sediment plume kicked up by the Sydney Harbor dredging project, and presumably laden with industrial contaminants, has some officials annoyed over Environment Canada’s failure to regulate the project.
Gerry Langille, a Sydney-based industrial photographer often used by government agencies, snapped the photos Wednesday in calm conditions at slack tide. They have since circulated widely among federal and provincial bureaucrats.
The Google Earth screenshot at left shows the approximate location of the upper photograph. The photo below shows the shoreline at Pt. Edward where the dredged material makes landfall, and where most of the sedimentation appears to originate. The infilled material will supposedly form the foundation for a container pier, but provincial and federal officials are privately skeptical it will ever be built.
The $38-million dredging project, condemned by some as a costly boondoggle raising false hopes for economic revival in Sydney, was widely seen as an effort to elect Conservative candidate Cecil Clarke in last spring’s federal election. Clarke lost narrowly to five-term Liberal MP Mark Eyking, but was subsequently hired as a $135,000/year consultant to the Cape Breton County Economic Development Agency. The position is funded by Enterprise Cape Breton Corporation, the federal agency funding Ottawa’s share of the dredging project.
The Sydney Tar Ponds were first identified as an environmental problem in 1982, when fisheries scientists found high levels of polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in lobster caught in Sydney Harbor. They fingered the Tar Ponds as the probable source. A 2002 report by Kenneth Lee of the Bedford Institute of Oceanography found harbor sediments contaminated with widely varying levels of industrial chemicals, particularly PAHs.
Contaminant levels are thought to have declined since the coke ovens stopped operating in 1988, thanks to dispersion from tidal action, storms, and the prop wash from the large cruise ships that regularly dock just outside the Tar Ponds. The dredging project, sold as a first step to the container terminal, received provincial environmental approval in 2009, based on an environmental assessment prepared by the engineering firm Jacques Whitford.
In 2009, and again last February, the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency approved the project based on an environmental screening, the lightest form of environmental assessment, but the screening report does not appear on the agency’s hard-to-navigate website.
Officials of Public Works and Government Services Canada, the federal department responsible for the Tar Ponds cleanup, threatened to suspend marine effects monitoring of that project Friday because uncontrolled sedimentation from the nearby harbor dredging would obliterate the small amount of sediments escaping the Tar Ponds.
One official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue, complained of a double standard by Environment Canada and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Just last week, Environment Canada ordered the provincial Sydney Tar Ponds Agency to lift a control boom at the outer edge of the Tar Ponds so a Cape Islander could enter the North Tar Pond and collect sediment samples. Meanwhile, the same agencies took no action as the dredging project kicked up a huge plume of presumably contaminated sediments a few hundred meters away.
“We are pumping all the water from Coke Ovens Brook and the Wash Brook around both Tar Ponds,” the official said. “The South Pond is completely filled in. How could our project possibly be doing anything but reducing the amount of sediments moving into the harbor?”
[Disclosure: I managed communications for the Tar Ponds cleanup from 2001 to 2007, when the Sydney Tar Ponds Agency terminated my contract.]
From the folks who brought you a non-random, self-selecting census
A report last week in the prestigious scientific journal Nature revealed that the hole in the ozone layer over the Arctic was the largest ever recorded—comparable for the first time to the man-induced hole that appears every year in the ozone layer over the Antarctic. But when reporters asked Canadian scientist David Tarasick, who was involved in the study, to explain its findings, Environment Canada refused to let him speak.
David Tarasick, muzzled by Environment Canada
Environment Canada scientist David Tarasick, whose team played a key role in the report published Sunday in the journal Nature, is not being allowed to discuss the discovery with the media.
Environment Canada told Postmedia News that an interview with Tarasick “cannot be granted.” Tarasick is one of several Environment Canada ozone scientists who have received letters warning of possible “discontinuance of job function” as part of the downsizing underway in the department.
Meanwhile, the Harper Government is cutting back on ozone monitoring. CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks host Bob MacDonald decries the government’s behaviour:
How has this country turned from a world leader in environmental protection, to one where scientists are forbidden to speak and the government seems to have turned its back on environmental protection?
….Scientists are our eyes on the planet. Their detailed monitoring of changes to the atmosphere, water, and movements in the ground, give us a window into the complex interplay of the Earth’s many systems. They also see how human activity has an effect on those systems and the courses they will take in the future.
Over the long term, the scientists see trends, such as warming temperatures, loss of Arctic sea ice, shifting ocean currents or changes in biology, that are used to make predictions about the type of world our children will inherit.
H/T: Elizabeth May
Rare concision in airline safety prose
Air Canada flight attendant to passengers in Row 4 of a flight to Sydney Tuesday afternoon:
“You are in the emergency exit row, so I have to show you how to open the emergency door.”
[Gestures to door handle.]
“Pull it down. It opens in. Throw it out.”
[Pause.]
“Any questions?”
Airline safety instructions are so often wordy and prissy. How refreshing to encounter a no-nonsense pro who understands the value of brisk, imperative prose, and isn’t afraid to use it.
