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Sunshine Coast, British Columbia • www.thelocalweekly.ca • Thursday, Nov 6, 2014 Gibsons Vet Gets Medal
Big Coal: "The last battleground"
Page 11
Gibsons All Candidates Page 6
Roberts Creek Update Page 8
Remembering Our Soldiers Page 10
Middle Aged Vegan Page 16
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Coal-barge opponent Donald Gordon spoke in Sechelt Nov.1. Photo Rik Jespersen
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Open-topped coal barges the size of football fields will be towed past the Sunshine Coast every day, potentially spreading environmentally dangerous coal dust all the way from the Fraser River to Texada Island unless last-ditch legal efforts to stop it are successful, experts told a Sechelt audience last weekend. The forum, Coal Hard Facts II, was sponsored by the Salish Sea Coal Committee (SSCC) and held Nov. 1 at the Sechelt First Nation’s band hall. It was the second such event staged by the committee in the past year. The audience of about 150 heard from legal, environmental and biology professionals, who said that only a few hurdles remain before the coal industry gets the green light to establish the barge route between yet-to-be expanded coal terminals on Texada and at the Surrey-Fraser docks.
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Some four million metric tonnes a year would be hauled on the route and then shipped by freighter back across the Salish Sea and through the Strait of Juan de Fuca to China. “The project now needs to get two more permits from Metro Vancouver, an air quality permit and a wastewater discharge permit,” said Laura Benson, of the environmental watchdog Dogwood Initiative. “We’re looking to that process as the last battleground.” Activists opposed to the project are fighting on an uneven playing field, according to Donald Gordon, of the group Voters Taking Action on Climate Change. “There’s extremely strong evidence that this decision was entirely pre-judged,” Gordon said. “The fix was in from the moment it was applied for. Any pretext that the public could have a say was window-dressing.”
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Coal and coal dust contain heavy metals such as mercury, the SSCC noted in an information handout. “Open topped coal barges will be running past your front doors here. These barges will have eight-foot-high walls. The coal is going to be stacked 20 feet high,” Gordon said. He added that if the industry gets permission, it will operate virtually unregulated and unmonitored, despite assurances that no barges would run if wind speeds exceed 40 kmh. “There’s no monitoring of what the wind speeds are. There’s no mechanism for saying when they hit such a speed, they will have to stop.” Gordon said the companies applying for permits had offered to monitor for coal dust, but that in the end, they received approval with no monitoring required. (Continued on page 3) “What Coast Guard?”
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