After CamBay waste oil spill, keep all tank valves locked, GN advises

A vacuum truck owned by Kitnuna cleans up oily water at the Cambridge Bay shoreline after a June 14 spill saw about 11,000 litres of waste oil flow down from a tank through the company’s yard. (PHOTO BY RED SUN PRODUCTIONS)

To prevent a spill of oil, like the one which took place June 14 in Cambridge Bay, the advice from the Government of Nunavut’s environment department is simple: lock up any valves on oil or gas tanks.

“Think about little things,” said Robert Eno, manager of pollution control from the GN’s environmental protection service. “You build a bullet-proof system, and then you have this little Achilles heel in the form of an open valve.”

Vandals are suspected to have played a role in the June 14 incident, which saw about 11,000 litres of waste oil released from a tank on the premises of Kitnuna Corp.

The oil flowed out for hours, through the yard and down to the shoreline, before the company was alerted to the spill and could start cleaning up the damage.

The matter is still under investigation by the RCMP and a youth has been identified as a possible suspect, police said June 18.

But Eno said it’s not the first time that the GN has seen spills resulting from open valves.

“Especially if it’s a valve for a spout, they should be locked — always. You lock them with a chain and a padlock,” Eno said. “That keeps people from tampering with them because kids like nothing better than turning valves.”

You need to do everything you can to keep what inside the tank from leaking out, he said, “short of encasing the thing in concrete and posting armed guards 24-7.”

But even so Eno said “things happen.”

“Sometimes you can take all the preventative action you want, but, at the end of the day, if vandals decide they want to cause mischief, there’s only so much you can do,” he said.

However, it is the responsibility of private businesses and homeowners to ensure the safety of their tanks. And the GN has produced a guide with tips to that effect.

That being said, the clean-up effort in Cambridge Bay, where the GN has a conservation and environment officer, appears to be going well, he said.

Since the discovery of the spill, heavy machinery, vacuum trucks and absorbent pads have been used to contain and remove the waste oil.

The key to the spill clean-up measures, Eno said, is to “stop it at the source, get control of it at the site, try to keep it migrating off the site, try to keep it out of water, and if it’s getting into water try to seal with it the best you can.”

You must must also remove the soil which has been affected by the spill — and that’s not always easy because sometimes a spill can reappear if it sinks into the ground and then travels.

“We’ve had spills where it disappeared — and the next thing you know it’s reappearing somewhere else,” Eno said.

That was the case in Resolute Bay in 2011 where more than 150,000 litres of fuel spilled out at the tank farm — due to a combination of issues, including valves which were not closed, Eno said.

Eno said the June 14 spill in Cambridge Bay is much smaller in volume it still “a fairly major spill.”

That’s because the significance of a spill depends on the volume as well as on the type of material spilled, and “waste oil is particularly persistent stuff,” Eno said.

“A spill of a litre of diesel fuel would be considered a fairly minor incident — a spill of a litre of radioactive material would be considered a fairly major event. It’s a combination of volume and the nature of the substance,” Eno said. “In this instance, we’ve got a fair volume of the materials and it’s waste oil.”

An environmental spill can lead to charges under the Environmental Protection Act if it can be demonstrated at a spill took place due to carelessness or vandalism or that it was incorrectly cleaned up.

There are a number of cases when enforcement action becomes a “a possibility.”

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans is also involved in surveying the clean-up effort of the June 14 oil spill where some oil ended up on the shore and in the water.