Western Front - 1973 October 2

              the western front western Washington state college
Vol. 66
No. 2
TUESDAY
October 2, 1973
Ten Cents
Recycle all paper
Today is the last day
to add or drop a class
4 0 0 gather to protest super oil tankers
byRAHNLAHTI
Cleanup crews were still mopping up
the mess caused by last Tuesday's 50,000
gallon oil spill when 400 Canadians and
American protesters converged on the
Peace Arch at the Blaine border crossing
last Sunday.
The gathering listened to protests
against proposals to carry millions of gal­lons
of oil by tanker through the Strait
of Juan de Fuca from the Alaskan pipe­line
terminal at Valdez, Alaska to Cherry
Point, Wash.
The demonstration was sponsored by
the Coalition Against Oil Pollution and
a Canadian environmental organization,
the Society for Pollution and
Environmental Control (SPEC). These
groups provided speakers from their
own ranks as well as other
environmentalists and both Canadian
and U.S. government officials.
Speakers at the rally called for a ban
on supertankers within the enclosed
waters of Puget Sound and the Strait of
Juan de Fuca.
Preceding the demonstration, a
caravan of cars passed through
Beliingham with their lights on and signs
imploring "Stop the Supertankers"
filling their windows. Persons from the
Beliingham community joined the
caravan as it continued its journey to
the Peace Arch.
Opening speakers admitted defeat in
their previous attempts to stop the
trans-Alaska pipeline. Jim Bolland,
Sierra Club president, with his voice
growing ever louder, told the audience,
"We have lost the fight against the oil
pipeline, but we're now going to fight
the supertankers!"
He went on to call supertankers in
the straits "an act of environmental
aggression." Later he called for the
Canadian government to "prohibit
supertankers from entering the Juan de
Fuca Strait." The audience responded
with loud applause.
One of the few American speakers at
t h e p r e d o m i n a n t l y Canadian
demonstration outlined the size of the
new ships in terms most people could
easily visualize. The ships will be about
one and a half times as long as the
Seattle Space Needle is tall. That is
about 11 football fields long.
He went on to add, "The ships will
be capable of carrying 40 million gallons
of oil each. Let's not fool ourselves,
they are truly supertankers!"
A Canadian government official took
a swipe at what he called "Canadian
national hypocrisy," stating that on the
east coast of Canada, while Americans
are beginning to require double hulls on
all oil tankers entering their ports,
officials urged by the Canadian oil
companies are sticking with the less
expensive single-hull craft in order to
capture some quick business at the
expense of the Americans.
But from that moment on, the
demonstration looked like a Canadian
nationalist convention with the United
States as the prime target of dissent.
'We don't want their tankers down our
t h r o a t s , " said another Canadian
environmentalist. The 85 per cent
Canadian audience roared approval.
"America equates a high standard of
waste with a high standard of living,"
intoned another speaker to the roar of
the crowd.
The largest ovation came, though, at
the concluding point in a four point
proposal set forth by another Canadian
environmentalist. He said the proposal
had been submitted to Canadian
government officials.
His plan called for:
1) The Canadian government, using
legal precedent, would establish a
200-mile environmental protective zone,
barring the supertankers.
2) The Canadian government's
lawyers would look into the possibility
of barring the supertankers from the
Strait of Juan de Fuca on the grounds
that the strait is not an international
waterway, but an international
boundary. He said legal precedent has
allowed that such a waterway can not
be used for anything that may be
dangerous to either of the neighboring
countries.
3) Legislation would be established
for liability without guilt, forcing the oil
companies to pay for all damages
inflicted by oil spills. He said that is
they had to pay for just one oil spill by
a supertanker, they would lose all the
profits possible from the Alaska oil.
4) The British Columbia legislature
would pass a law stating that as soon as
the first supertanker "sticks its nose" in
the straits Canada would shut off
natural gas exports to the United States
of America.
As the crowd continued its
thunderous applause to the final point,
the speaker yelled, "We'll learn to use
our own gas instead of their oil."
Many of the speakers prefaced their
remarks by citing the recent oil spill at
Vancouver, B.C., as "only a warning of
what might happen if the supertankers
are allowed to enter the straits."
The 50,000 gallon spill, following a
two ship collision near the mouth of the
Vancouver harbor, contaminated more
than 11 miles of beaches, the Associated
Press reported. United States oil cleanup
equipment was rushed to the scene to
aid the Canadian effort.
The oil flowed into the Strait of
Georgia from the British 9,200-ton
freighter Erawan after the 8,200-ton
Japanese containership Sun Diamond's
bow cut a 30-foot gash in her starboard
midships section in the pre-dawn
collision.
It has been reported that the
collision accured in good weather, but
no one is willing to say anything
because of an inquiry by the Canadian
Transport Department. Canadian
officials have placed, the Sun Diamond
under arrent pending civil action to
recover costs of the spill estimated to
exceed $250,000.
Protesters were quick to add that this
quarter of a million dollar spill is only
one-eightieth of the potential
supertanker catastrophe sure to be in
the offing, if allowed to happen.