Dear Editor:
Re. Tanker safety is paramount, Letters to the editor, Burnaby NOW, Oct. 10.
First of all, thank you to Jennifer Moreau and the Burnaby NOW editorial team for your thorough coverage of the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion, keeping it in the public eye.
On Saturday afternoon my mother and I took a walk in Barnet Marine Park. Just offshore, an oil tanker waiting by Kinder Morgan's Westridge terminal let out a huge belch of brown smog, which drifted down Burrard Inlet towards the park.
If the pipeline expansion is approved, there will be seven times as many tankers sitting in the Inlet, belching smog, just between Barnet Marine and Confederation Parks, and under the Capitol Hill, Burrard Inlet and Burnaby Mountain Conservation Areas.
Even if Kinder Morgan never has an oil spill again, we'll be affected by the tankers' air pollution. For example, the ravine of Confederation Park is a natural funnel; already, odours from the refinery on Inlet waft right up to the top of the park, where there are hundreds of people of all ages every day, enjoying the senior centre, library, pool, track, ball fields, playground and elementary school.
Will our parks become the way I remember Pittsburgh in the 1960s, when everything you touched outside was covered in black soot?
We the citizens of Burnaby voted for our parks and pay for them with our taxes. They are at direct
risk from the proposed pipeline expansion, no matter how "safe" Kinder Morgan claims to be.
Thank you, Mayor Corrigan, for challenging a private company's assumption that it has the right to ruin our parks for its own profit. This certainly should be a constitutional issue.
Lise Kreps, Burnaby
