The Livable Blog

Congratulation to MLA Guy Gentner (NDP-Delta North)! It is about time the NDP started pointing out the blatant contradictions in Campbell's climate policies, instead of shooting themselves in the foot over the carbon tax. (Note - August is a best time of year to quietly drop a campaign and change direction.)

But barges should not be thought of as just an efficient low-carbon way of moving goods around the lower mainland. Logical destinations include Victoria, Nanaimo, and Washington State ports including Seattle. Combine this with increased use of rail for inland destinations, and we could take a very large proportion of heavy trucks off all the major truck routes in the region. This would greatly reduce local pollution and GHG emissions as well as reducing the death rate from crashes. It would also eliminate the rationale for the whole Gateway Program and well as other planned highway expansions in the region.

But there is one big catch, the Gateway Council wants to use short sea shipping as a way to access new industrial areas upstream from the Port Mann Bridge. This means:
- Paving over sensitive undisturbed wetlands and agricultural land for industrial facilities
- Increasing barge traffic (and perhaps dredging) in the crucial salmon habitat in the gravel reach of the Fraser
- Overbuilding container facilities when our present facilities are grossly underutilized and container shipping to North America is on the decline. (This will likely be a permanent decline due to peak oil and global warming. Peak oil means peak globalization.)

Short sea shipping needs to be limited to existing industrial areas on the Fraser. But there are lots of vacant facilities that already have barge facilities. The tugs also need to burn low-sulfur diesel and have modern pollution control, but this can be retrofitted on existing tugs.

Fraser River works as transport route
Environmental impact less when containers put on barges
Brian Lewis, The Province
Published: Tuesday, August 12, 2008

A report commissioned by local port authorities but virtually ignored by the B.C. government for more than three years now raises serious doubts about the economic viability of building the $1-billion South Fraser Perimeter Road.

In fact, the holes it opens in the so-called rationale for this 40-kilometre, four-lane truck freeway through Delta farmland and Burns Bog are large enough to drive an 18-wheel container truck through.

Perhaps its biggest flaw is Victoria's failure to look seriously at alternatives for moving more shipping containers to and from an expanding Deltaport at Roberts Bank.

One alternative is to move more shipping containers through Deltaport in the same way both First Nations and the early European settlers moved goods -- by using the Fraser River.

As the 112-page report by Novacorp International concluded in 2005, it is economically feasible to transfer huge numbers of containers to and from container ships at Roberts Bank by using Fraser River barges for ongoing distribution via rail or truck well outside the Greater Vancouver core.

A barge carrying up to 500 containers and towed by one tug is far more cost effective and environmentally friendly than 500 trucks carrying one container each, then driving through farms and communities south of the lower Fraser.

This report is now being circulated, thanks to MLA Guy Gentner (NDP-Delta North), who drew on its contents during his rebuttal of the B.C. government's recent acceptance of its Environmental Assessment Office's review and green light on the project.

As Gentner says, the SFPR is an obsolete, 20-year-old idea being rammed down taxpayer throats in today's fast-changing world where very high fuel costs and strong concerns about pollution trump the old-fashioned "rubber-on-the-road" shipping solutions.

"It [the SFPR] is, in fact, the most expensive and environmentally damaging option that the Campbell government could have chosen," he says.

Unbelievably, he points out, the Environmental Assessment Office's review gave just a scant six lines in its 138-page report to the river option called "short sea shipping," which is widely used in Europe and elsewhere.

For one thing, the Novacorp study looked at delivery costs compared to transporting goods by road and found that the economics of short sea shipping do indeed work.

Key executives within the port authority are also on the record for having spoken very favourably about the benefits of short sea shipping.

And environmentalists should absolutely love the concept because the Novacorp study found, for example, that there would be a 277-per-cent reduction in emissions in moving 200 containers by barge from Roberts Bank to Fraser Surrey Docks rather than by truck on the SFPR.

"The assessment office ran rough-shod over community concerns, environmental impacts and economic alternatives," Gentner claims.

Finally, short of SFPR opponents asking for a judicial review, Gentner says that, if his party wins next May's provincial election, it will take a second look at the SFPR project, before its construction begins later in 2009.

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If you have a story idea or note-worthy item about anything going on in the Fraser Valley, you can e-mail Brian at blewis@theprovince.com

© The Vancouver Province 2008
http://www.canada.com/theprovince/columnists/story.html?id=321596e2-b1a7-4877-aa80-c622fb725b71