Toronto city councillors are challenging the safety of bitumen transport by both rail and pipeline, echoing similar concerns of Hamilton staff but advocating much stronger action. Toronto wants the National Energy Board (NEB) to block the opening of Enbridge’s Line 9 and is also demanding higher safety and transparency standards for oil trains.
A resolution adopted overwhelming this month by Toronto council demands shut-off valves on both sides of the streams crossed by Enbridge’s controversial Line 9 pipe that runs from Sarnia to Montreal. It asks the NEB to require this before allowing the company to begin expanded flows in the facility. The council motion charges that “condition 16 of the National Energy Board's decision has not been fully met at water crossings along Line 9B and therefore the Greater Toronto Area's drinking waters have been left at risk.”
Last fall Hamilton city staff pushed for more shut-off valves but dropped the matter after Enbridge issued assurances that variations in pipeline elevations will provide sufficient protection to streams like Spencer Creek. The Line 9 plans include reversing the direction of flow in the 40-year-old pipeline, increasing shipped volumes by 25 percent, and adding diluted bitumen to the pumped products.
Concerns about those changes have been heightened by warnings issued by the US federal pipeline regulator. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) alerted “operators of hazardous liquid and gas transmission pipelines of the potential significant impact flow reversals, product changes and conversion to service may have on the integrity of a pipeline. Failures on natural gas transmission and hazardous liquid pipelines have occurred after these operational changes.”
And in the wake of a series of oil train derailments, Mayor John Tory and the 17 councillors whose wards border the CP rail line used for oil transport through Toronto issued an open letter demanding action by the federal Minister of Transportation. This rail line – which also passes through the north-east corner of Hamilton – was used by the oil train that derailed and blew up in Lac Megantic killing 47 people and demolishing the town’s business district.
The letter points to “the significant increase of trains carrying crude oil over the past five years – from 500 carloads in 2009 to an estimated 140,000 in 2013” and says “a significant number of these potentially volatile freight trains are using the Canadian Pacific rail line that runs through some of Toronto’s densest neighbourhoods”.
Toronto representatives are calling for better communications by rail companies with local municipalities and speedier replacement of tank cars acknowledged to be unsafe. The Dot 111 model is recognized as unsafe and scheduled to be phased out over several years, but the recent derailments and explosions in northern Ontario involved newer cars, leading Canada’s Transportation Safety Board to recommend further upgrades.
Similar measures have been sought by Hamilton councillors and the city’s fire chief, but they have recently softened that stance despite citizen interventions.
Municipal and provincial interventions focused on the safety of oil shipments present a growing challenge to the Harper government’s contention that these are exclusively federal matters. The conflict erupted again last week over bunker oil fouling Vancouver beaches, and a little earlier in Quebec where provincial and public opposition forced abandonment of a new oil tanker terminal on the St Lawrence and a resulting two-year delay of the massive Energy East pipeline project.
TransCanada Pipelines indicated that it would look for an alternative tanker port to the one in Cacouna, Quebec which threatened the habitat of endangered beluga whales, and acknowledged that the change will delay construction of the 4600 kilometre project until at least 2020. That will also push back the NEB review of the project that has already received over 2000 requests for intervenor rights.