“Four days into the spill there were still shorelines within the Islands Trust Area – including seabird colonies – that were getting oiled”, Trustee Sheila Malcolmson reported recently about a mock oil spill exercise in which she recently took part.

During her trustee’s report at the June 28 LTC meeting at the WI Hall, Malcolmson said she was involved in the oil spill exercise which was staged by Western Marine Response (WMR). She said WMR is the cleanup crew for many of the smaller oil spills on the coast.

Calling the exercise an “impressive operation” she said even with WMR’s “very best practices and all the equipment available, they recovered – in their computer generated exercise – 15 per cent of the oil spilled. And that was standard. That’s actually high we were told”.

Malcolmson said none of this was linked to increased tanker traffic, only to the shipping risks already taking place in the Salish Sea. She said this “bolsters even more the need to prevent spills in the first place”.