Vancouver marine life important in emergency measures

Humans got away from the Port Vancouver fire, but what about the fishies?

If you were in Vancouver in the afternoon on March 4, chances are you witnessed or heard about a chemical fire that swept across the eastern part of the city from the Port of Vancouver.

While emergency response authorities were able to quickly resolve the situation, it is more of an issue of too little, too late. We have no estimate on how much of the toxic chemicals spilled into the air, and perhaps even into the water. In essence, we continue to live our life on land without sufficient thought to life in the water.

Since there isn’t much we can do following this incident, the biggest action we should be taking is in prevention. Safety measures applying to the transportation of containers containing dangerous goods, especially to the environment, should have their own standard of regulations. Officials should, of course, focus on the immediate threat to the lives of the public first and foremost, but in an area where our water is so instrumental to our everyday lives, there should also be emergency respondents that focus first and foremost on the environment’s care as well. When we forget to think of our life on land affecting life in the water, we’re bound to forget that it goes both ways. Life in the water will equally affect life on land.

According to News 1130, the Vancouver Fire Department said the fire originated from a single shipping container. It took officials several hours to gain access to the fire because the container was buried deep within a large stack of other containers. As of now, the exact cause of the fire is unknown, only that it spread quickly to another three containers and the chemicals within burned for over an hour. The fire itself was not fully extinguished until the following night.

The fire prompted a Hazmat response, the evacuation of hundreds of people from the area and forced the Port of Vancouver to close. A portion of the downtown core, as well as the transit system, was closed off as well due to the heavy, toxic smoke that made its way into the air.

These same evacuations obviously cannot apply to water life. Although the risks would be short-term to a person with minimal exposure to the chemicals, the risks to animal life would be quite the opposite. As stated in a concluding article following the fire in TheGastwon Gazette, the research of Dr. Peter Ross, a toxicologist from the Vancouver Aquarium, says if we were to hypothetically deposit one litre of the substance into a 40-litre aquarium, none of the marine life inside would survive.

Vancouver Coastal Health recommended residents and anyone in the Downtown Eastside at the time of the fire to remain indoors. The stay-in order was not lifted until 6 p.m. that same afternoon. In that time, there was plenty of support made available, as stated on the City of Vancouver website, for Vancouverites in the area. Anyone that had to go outside was instructed to do so with extreme caution. Officials did well to prepare and protect the general public, but it was in the continued safety and welfare of the environment and wildlife that they ultimately failed.

According to The Gazette, all of the facts regarding damage to the water and surrounding habitats will come from Environment Canada and the Department Fisheries and Oceans Canada. They should be responding to this, but it’s hard to say how much data they are collecting. A project of this magnitude to calculate the damage is not only costly, but at this point, almost impossible. Once a chemical spill has entered our waterways, it’s no longer in a contained area.

The casualties due to the fire will not fully be known for some time. Vancouverites should expect to see fish coming to shore “belly-up” after something like this has happened.