B.C. spill response team is like ‘fire department’
Global News
Engineer Jashan Bains is the first to spot a black dorsal fin cutting through the water.
VICTORIA – Engineer Jashan Bains is the first to spot a black dorsal fin cutting through the water.
“Whale, one o’clock,” he says.
It’s a September morning on board the Hecate Sentinel, a 20-metre long skimming vessel, one of eight ships the Western Canada Marine Response Corp. maintains in Sidney, B.C., and one of eight bases along the B.C. coast.
Captain Dylan Adams, safety co-ordinator Lauren Walker and the rest of the bridge crew turned to see a second, then a third fin appear. They belong to a trio of killer whales.
“We don’t see orcas that often,” Adams says, glancing up from the instruments. “I would say it is more of a rare occurrence. It’s because they are so fast, they don’t spend a lot of time on the surface.”
For Adams and the rest of crew, the unexpected encounter is also reminder of the ecosystem they are tasked to protect.
On this day, Hecate Sentinel is on its way to join other vessels from Sidney, as well as from Beecher Bay west of Victoria and Nanaimo for a daylong exercise to contain an imaginary oil spill.
The practice is all the more important as more ships leave Vancouver’s Burrard Inlet after the expansion of the Trans Mountain oil pipeline and talk from Alberta Premier Danielle Smith about pushing for a pipeline across British Columbia’s north.
