The Haunting of Hartley Bay

The Globe and Mail has published an interesting article in its Saturday paper (on the stand at Eddies on Saturday night), about the now nationally famous community of Hartley Bay. The article begins by dwelling on the sinking of the Queen of the North and the impact that the tragedy has had on the small village.

From there it takes an interesting twist and looks into the future and expands the discussion into the potential situation of tanker traffic in their local waters. Tankers that may one day soon come from the recently announced Enbridge pipeline development in Kitimat.

The prospect of supertankers three times the length of a football field plying the waters of Douglas Channel, has the residents there a little concerned for their current way of life and how a project of such scope could change their lives forever.

It’s quite a thought provoking piece and certainly puts their concerns into vivid terms that will no doubt find notice in the offices of not only Enbridge, but with politicians in Kitimat, Victoria and Ottawa.


Hartley Bay's ghost in the water
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
September 2, 2006

HARTLEY BAY, B.C. — As they line up on the boardwalk outside Emmanuel United Church, which lies at the heart of a village surrounded by a vast wilderness known as the Great Bear Rainforest, the bridal party has good reason to be nervous.

First, the bride is missing, and second, there hasn't been a marriage in Hartley Bay in 15 years, so they are out of practice.

The groomsmen, resplendent in tuxedos rented by boat from a store 140 kilometres away, wear pink vests, running shoes and work boots. With big, rough hands toughened by work at sea, they straighten each other's collars and brush away lint as a young man hurries by, a glossy tie scrunched in his hand.

“Does anyone know how to tie this?” he asks, scurrying into the church, where the pews are packed and people are wondering where the bride is.

“She ain't coming!” an old man sitting on a nearby porch calls to those waiting in the sunshine outside.

But he's wrong. Moments later, Nerissa Bolton and her bridesmaids come hurrying to the church, dresses swishing, high heels clacking on the network of boardwalks that link the roadless village.

The wedding of Ms. Bolton and Myron Dundas in Hartley Bay, population 180, lifts, at least momentarily, a pall of sadness hanging over this small fishing port. This Gitga'at village, which jumped to national attention this past spring for rescuing survivors from the sinking B.C. ferry, Queen of the North, has seen several respected elders die recently. And the loss has come just when people here need leadership most.

Those who remain have been under pressure because the ferry tragedy has awakened the village to a growing threat. The glistening blue fjord spread out below the village could soon become a major West Coast shipping route for supertankers loaded with oil, condensate and liquefied natural gas.

The wreck of the Queen — which lies at the bottom of the water nearby — is a constant reminder of what can happen to a big ship when things go wrong at sea.
Six months after the sinking, you can still catch the faint scent of diesel fuel out where the accident happened.

Floating above the wreck, after hearing the people of Hartley Bay describe that calamitous night, it is impossible to look across Wright Sound without sensing the presence of the vessel. It is as if there is a ghost down there in the water ready to rise up again.

“When you go past that place, you always slow down. It sort of has that haunting,” said Helen Clifton, an elder in the Gitga'at village, whose people poured out of their houses, in the middle of that March 22 night, in a heroic rescue mission.

The Queen haunts them not because of what they saw when the ship went down, roaring like a freight train with windows and steel plates blowing almost 15 metres into the air and diesel pouring into the sea, but because of what it might say about their future.

“It is like an omen, a warning,” Ernie Hill, hereditary Chief of the Eagle Clan, said at his home earlier this week.

“It's shaken us.”

Shortly after the 107-metre-long vessel sank, villagers learned that a stream of tankers could start plying Douglas Channel by 2010, serving proposed pipelines — with capacities of 400,000 barrels of oil and 150,000 barrels of condensate daily — that would link the port of Kitimat to Alberta's tar sands. Supertankers three football fields in length (300 times the deadweight tonnage of the Queen) would deliver LNG or condensate, an oil-thinning fluid, and take away crude.

With small oil slicks still drifting on the tides near the wreck of the Queen, the Gitga'at feel a sense of foreboding that the fast-paced outside world could soon slam right into theirs.
If a ferry loaded with people can run full speed into an island, they ask, why not a supertanker loaded with oil?

“With the Queen going down, all of a sudden our eyes are being opened to what's going on in the world . . . It just opened my mind to the big bomb that's coming down on this little group of people. The world of progress and development,” Mrs. Clifton says.

“The tar sands. We never, ever thought about that affecting our world. Now here it is.”
Mrs. Clifton, an elderly woman with two fierce killer whales carved in gold dangling around her neck, daubs salmonberry jam on toast and sips a cup of tea. About the house, people are fussing to get ready for the wedding reception. Outside, villagers rush along the boardwalks carrying tubs of crab to be cooked and bins of smoked salmon for the wedding feast, to which the entire village is invited.

In the midst of this excitement, Mrs. Clifton has stopped at Chief Hill's house to talk about the threat of tanker traffic. In the matriarchal Gitga'at society, Mrs. Clifton, whose late husband was a respected chief, speaks with a soft voice and a ring of authority. Her hands shake with anger when she describes what a supertanker spill could do to a community where people are so dependent on nature that their freezers are packed, not with store-bought groceries, but with wild clams, salmon, halibut, deer meat and eulachon (a small herring-like fish) grease. “If they destroy the natural environment, that's the end of us as a people,” she says. “What about the salmon streams? What about the wolves? What about the whales all through there?”

When the Queen sank, there were 101 passengers and crew, 16 cars and 240,000 litres of diesel fuel and light oil aboard. It isn't known how much fuel remains in the vessel's tanks, which have yet to be pumped out, but by comparison to what a supertanker can carry — 300,000 tonnes of oil or more — it was a small amount. Even so, it spread a slick over a large area and raised fears that still linger.

In Hartley Bay, people follow “seasonal rounds,” collecting seaweed, shellfish, salmon and game, each in their own time and place. Last March, they had just finished the spring shellfish harvest when ferry fuel washed onto a beach that is so rich in edible resources it is called “clam town.”
“I used to think of this whole area as the best food bank in the world. If you needed anything you would just go out. But now you worry. Is it still going to be there?” Chief Hill asks.

“Enbridge [Enbridge Inc., the proponents of the $4-billion Gateway pipeline project to Kitimat] says their responsibility ends at the end of the pipeline. So who's responsible for the tankers? We're told, don't worry, they are all double-hulled. You can't tell me that Mother Nature is going to flatten out her seas for those double-hulled tankers,” Mrs. Clifton says.

“I'm the Eagle Chief,” Chief Hill notes. “I look after our stories and our land. But being a steward of the land never hit home until the Queen. Now with Enbridge, you just feel so helpless. Who will listen to us?”

“It seems futile. It's like David and Goliath, but we don't have the slingshot,” agrees his wife, Lynne Hill.

The people of Hartley Bay are not alone in their concerns, however. Not far from the village, Michael Uehara, president and managing director of King Pacific Lodge, is watching the situation with a sense of dread.

“The supertanker alternate route is right there,” he says, pointing to a channel from the deck of his floating ecotourism resort, which works closely with the people of Hartley Bay. “To have all those tankers in here could be devastating to us as a business.”

Mr. Uehara's luxurious lodge provides access to the Great Bear Rainforest, where nearly two million hectares were recently designated parkland by the province. His guests see wolves running on sand beaches, watch black and rare white Kermode, or Spirit Bears, feeding in salmon streams, and drift beside breaching whales. They take helicopters to mountaintops to hike and go deep into the rain forest to fly fish remote rivers.

“People are transformed by the experiences they have here,” he says. “It's a place that changes them.” They do not, he continues, want supertankers churning past while they contemplate this wild nature.

Mr. Uehara closes his eyes with a grimace when asked about the nightmare scenario: a supertanker going down in the middle of the Great Bear Rainforest, an area that in total covers 6.4 million hectares.

“We've got to stop those tankers,” he says, his eyes blinking open again.

But that won't be easy. Douglas Channel is the largest, widest, deepest fjord on the B.C. coast, and it provides a shorter link to the Interior than Prince Rupert. In June, a tanker went through Douglas Channel to unload 350,000 barrels of condensate to the existing CN rail line, starting what could be an increasing procession. When critics complained that the shipment violated a federal moratorium on oil tanker traffic, B.C.'s Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources Rich Neufeld, said the ban didn't apply to vessels headed for coastal ports — but only to offshore oil and gas development.

Transport Canada agreed.

“It's been happening before; it's picking up now,” he said of the shipping. “And there's no doubt about it, there will be more.”

While Kitimat welcomes increased traffic, at the other end of Douglas Channel, where the fjord opens onto the Pacific through a scattering of islands, almost everyone is worried about spills.
“We don't know how the fuel, spilled from the Queen, affected the whales,” says Janie Wray, who with her partner, Hermann Meuter, studies whales from an isolated cabin south of Gil Island. “But we do know that if there is a major oil spill it will be the end of the Great Bear Rainforest. It would be the end of the salmon, the eagles, the bears and the wolves. It would all be over because salmon are the linchpin species.”

The night the ferry sank, the night Hartley Bay got jolted into the modern world, began like any other for the village. The house lights, twinkling above a tiny, sheltered harbour, began to blink off as families went to bed. It was so silent all you could hear was the drum of rain on the boardwalks and the wind that was pushing whitecaps down the channel.

Then just after midnight, a voice full of panic called out on the marine channel.

It had such urgency that people who had their two-way radios on sat bolt upright in their beds.
“Mayday! Mayday! This is the Queen of the North!”

Somewhere on the dark seas just beyond the village, a massive ship was going down in an ice-cold sea. The great steel hull that plunged five metres below the surface had been ripped open by the barnacle-encrusted rocks by Gil Island. Within minutes the ship was listing badly.
Moments later phones were ringing all over the village, and soon the men were racing on their ATVs toward the harbour.

They ran down the ramp to the slips where their boats were moored behind a rocky sea wall and where blue scallop traps hang from dock piles, pausing to make a quick plan. The ferry was said to be roughly 30 minutes from the village, where Douglas Channel meets Wright Sound, in a place where six passes converge. A squall was blowing outside the breakwater, but by staying in a narrow channel behind Promise Island they would be sheltered until they hit Wright Sound.

“Remember, we don't want to be looking for any of our own boats out there. Only do what you can,” Marvin Robinson, of the Gitga'at Development Corporation, called out to 20 men and boys who'd come running in response to the most shocking mayday any of them had ever heard. They had grown up with marine radios constantly on in their kitchens, listening to the chatter of fishermen and seal hunters and tugboat captains. But nobody had ever heard a mayday from a ship as big as the Queen before.

“I don't know what's out there,” Mr. Robinson shouted into the wind as men zipped up their coats, the rain beating down on their faces. “Get as many survivors on board as you can. You might have to pluck dead bodies out of the water. Just do your best.”

And then they were scrambling into open speedboats and battered old gillnetters, threading their way down a twisting, pitch black, rocky channel. The big fishing boats led the way, the skippers orienting themselves by looking out at the dark mountaintops silhouetted against the night sky.

When Mr. Robinson's boat emerged from the pass, he saw the blazing lights of the Queen in the distance.

“There she is,” he shouted into the radio. “The water's flat. Let's go for it.”
The smaller, faster boats sprang into the lead then, the SEP (with Danny Danes, the fish hatchery manager, at the helm) and the Mad Max (with Jesse Bolton, a guide at King Pacific Lodge aboard).

The dozen boats from Hartley Bay found 99 passengers and crew drifting in life rafts, with the ferry sinking nearby. They loaded up their boats with the children, the elderly and 11 people with minor injuries. Then they watched as the Queen of the North suddenly tilted up, the cars coming loose inside and unleashing a horrendous, screeching, banging sound.

“She's going down. She's going down fast,” someone called over the radio for those waiting back at Hartley Bay. Then she sank beneath the waves, leaving the stench of diesel fuel and debris floating on the water.

By the time the rescue boats returned to the harbour, the women had opened the church and community hall. They brought in coffee, cakes and warm blankets. With the nursing station closed, they had scrounged together first-aid materials.

They cared for everyone until a Coast Guard cutter arrived, several hours later, to take the survivors to Prince Rupert. Then the media descended in helicopters — and for a brief time Hartley Bay was the focus of national attention.

Six months later, interest in the story has faded. But the people haven't forgotten. This week, just before they pulled on tuxedos as groomsmen, Mr. Robinson and Mr. Bolton, two of the first on scene that night, went back to the wreck site.

“They say it has stopped leaking, but there is still diesel here. You see it every day,” says Mr. Robinson, cruising up to a thin, glistening slick that drifts directly over where the Queen rests.
“When we complain about this, they say, ‘Oh, it could be from a passing cruise ship or something.' I say it's pretty obvious it's from the Queen.”

Along the shore Mr. Robinson points to copper paint on the rocks. “From the hull of the Queen,” he says. “This is the last spot that I know of that they hit. And this would have taken a big chunk of the ferry, the ferry's bottom, out.”

Lining his boat up with the paint scrapes and looking back up Grenville Channel, to where the ferry entered Wright Sound, Mr. Robinson indicates a direct line of transit.

“You can see she came right across. She never changed course, and ran straight into the island. It's incredible. I don't know how they could have done that,” he says.

Back in Hartley Bay, sitting around the kitchen table with Chief Hill, his wife, Lynne, and Mrs. Clifton, the same disbelief is expressed.

“The Queen of the North? Hitting an island? With all the expertise on board? It was unbelievable,” says Mrs. Clifton.

“And if that can happen to the Queen, you just have to wonder about these tankers,” adds Mr. Hill.

“They said the Titanic would never sink,” says Mrs. Clifton, shaking her head.

There hasn't been much reason to smile in Hartley Bay this summer, because of the deaths of the elders. But then Nerissa and Myron said they would wed, and a festive spirit came to town.
“It's good to see people here happy again,” says Mr. Uehara at the reception. “You just hope it can last. They're such good people.”

He has delivered a wedding cake by helicopter, rather than risk it being ruined in a rough boat ride.

Because the village is still in mourning, there is only one dance at the reception — for the bride and groom. People shower them with streamers as they turn slowly on the dance floor. It's pretty standard fare, but when the married couple embrace there is a special poignancy to the moment. You can't help but feel they are hanging on for more than just their own uncertain future — for the future of their village as well.

Near the back of the room, under pink and white balloons, Chief Hill rocks a baby.

“What I want is to protect the environment so my grandchildren can experience what I have,” he says looking down, almost in tears. The baby sleeps in his arms.