Editor:
I just don’t understand how it has come to be that some mayors and councils and universities in the Thompson region appear ready to accept cash offers from Kinder Morgan before a decision has been made on the proposed twinning of its pipeline.
In Langley, mayor and council have refused this money to date, some citizens even calling it a bribe.
The Kinder Morgan website notes the following will be “to compensate for the disruption” during pipeline construction: City of Kamloops, $700,000; Thompson Rivers University, $500,000; Clearwater, $390,000; Barriere, $290,000; and Vavenby, Birch Island, Black Pool, Blue River, Avola, Little Fort and Black Pines, $845,000.
I have been coming to the North Thompson region for 50 years for business and pleasure.
The sport and First Nations fisheries, and other river industries, are and always will be more economically important than the local valley pipeline industry.
In fact, the proposed new pipeline is not for Canadians at all, but involves a Texas company supplying China with tarsands bitumen.
As a businessman and one who enjoys the outdoors of the North Thompson, I can see only negative economic benefits coming from this tarsands pipeline.
This is because tarsands bitumen is the worst-polluting of all oils and would coat the Thompson and Fraser rivers for thousands of miles.
As we know from the Alaska and Kalamazoo spills, this oil would be unrecoverable and would kill the river for a generation or more.
There have been many spills on the Trans Mountain pipeline and there will be many more. This is just another statistic.
In my experience, Kinder Morgan does its utmost to keep these spills from public view.
I can forward a summary report of these past spills to concerned citizens who might wish to present it to city council.
David Ellis
Vancouver
davidellis@
lightspeed.ca
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