When Brian Hodgins found a large piece of styrofoam washed up on the beach near his house, gradually shredding into pieces with the tide, he dealt with it himself.
"I took a saw to free it from the concrete that's holding it together and hauled it up to my property," says Hodgins. "It scared me how much was there. And I want to go down and get more but I am 72 years old so it may not be such a good idea for me to be going down there. Fortunately my son in-law, when he comes here, he's going to help me haul more up and take it to the transfer station."
Hodgins says creosote logs wash up near his property all the time, but he just pushes them back out into the ocean. A weak solution, he says.
"There's no agency to deal with these things," he says. "Like for this styrofoam I'm not going to call DFO because they're never going to come."
When asked whether he thought about calling the municipality, he said he drafted an email, but doesn't think it's their responsibility.
"Why overload them?" said Hodgins. "They have enough to do."
The municipality has stepped in to help concerned citizens clean up the styrofoam mess. When Brenda McLuhan organized the first clean-up at Cape Roger Curtis, the municipality spoke to the property owners of the lot near the affected shoreline to ensure that volunteers could get to the mess without trespassing, and offered up a giant trash bin where they could put the mess.
In order to deal with the styrofoam and wrecked dock that was too large and in too precarious a position to move by hand, the Municipality hired Cormorant Marine to haul it away at a reduced rate.
Squamish resident John Buchanan got assistance from the district of Squamish, as he was allowed to dump three loads of both his pick-up truck and his and his boat filled with of debris (including styrofoam) into the local landfill.
"They did ask me, 'How much stuff is this? Because at a certain point we are going to have to re-assess whether or not you can dump it for free,'" says Buchanan.
The mess he hauled into the Squamish landfill was collected from the shoreline of Porteau Cove to Lions Bay the week of December 13. He believes the mess, like the mess on Bowen and another mess on Gambier and another near McNab Creek, came off of a giant dock structure with 15 styrofoam sections that he found on Anvil Island on November 24.
After finding the docks, Buchanan started making calls to try and find out more about it. Ruth Simons from the Future of Howe Sound Society confirmed that the dock originally belonged to the Thunderbird Marina in West Vancouver, and they'd sold it for $1 to a scrap metal collector.
Buchanan believes that the dock structure found on Bowen in late October may have broken off from the larger structure as it was being towed to Anvil Island.
After he found the dock, Buchanan called the provincial Ministry of Environment RAPP line (Report All Poachers and Polluters) to inform them about it. He didn't hear back initially, but now knows that the scrap collectors who own it have been contacted by the province and asked to clean them up.
"The docks are no longer on Anvil Island," says Buchanan. "But other than that I don't see any effort to clean up the debris scattered all over Howe Sound."
Ruth Simons has spoken with the owners of Thunderbird Marina, and has asked them to make a contribution to the dock clean-up efforts.
Simons says this incident also points to the lack of regulation and enforcement at higher levels of government.
"The result of this is that volunteers, NGOs and municipalities are left to invest time and money in these kind of clean-up efforts," says Simons. "Fortunately there seems to be more and more communication between group and between governments about these issues, and that helps a lot."
Closer communications between municipalities over the past year has been driven, not necessarily by singular incidents such as the "styrofoam bomb" that has exploded in Howe Sound, but by federal deregulation and three major industrial projects to be proposed for the region in the past year.
Bowen Island Municipality councillor Andrew Stone says that when the proposal to ship coal from Port Metro Vancouver to Texada Island, and then onto China, came under consideration, it became clear that responsibility for the environment has been downloaded to the municipal level.
"Every single municipality from here to Abbotsford said no to the whole coal proposal," says Stone. "We have every single city and town in the entire region, we have left-wing, right-wing and all shades in between, and they all said, 'no.' It also became clear that the federal government had essentially removed any and all regulation in terms of the approval process, leaving it up to us. That is my own observation."
The proposal to turn the Port of Metro Vancouver into a coal port is only one of three major industrial proposals made in the past year, all of which will directly impact the Salish Sea and those do not include the expansion of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain Pipeline, which will bring crude oil to tankers leaving from the company's port in Burnaby.
Kinder Morgan filed its application for the project last week. The expansion of the pipeline would mean that 400 oil tankers would travel through the Strait of Georgia every year, and the company admitted that, even without an oil spill, the impact of the tanker traffic on Southern Resident orcas would be 'high magnitude, high probability and significant.'
Stone says that the realization of the impact all of this will have on Metro Vancouver's municipalities is relatively new, but he doubts whether there will be a co-ordinated strategy among them beyond dealing with each proposal at a time.
"We're supposed to come to the table with an open-mind," says Stone. "Also, it would be difficult to form an alliance considering that each municipality has its own economic interests."
For Howe Sound's coastal municipalities, the situation is slightly different.
As Stone says, they are galvanized with the idea of ensuring the Sound thrives as a tourist destination, instead of as an industrial zone.
A resolution put forward by the Sunshine Coast Regional District, and agreed upon by the 18 municipalities of Howe Sound at the Union of BC Municipalities asks for the provincial government to work on a comprehensive management plan for Howe Sound.
"Municipal governments are all overworked, and none of them have enough money," says Ruth Simons with the Future of Howe Sound Society. "But by sharing information, and working together, I think they really do have the power to preserve and protect Howe Sound."
Simons says that anyone who finds evidence of marine pollution or any kind of spill should report it to the Future of Howe Sound Society, as the information can be used to see understand the big picture of what's happening in Howe Sound and take action to clean things up.
Note from Editor: In the next several issues of the Undercurrent, I will explore industrial projects proposed for Howe Sound, and their potential impacts on Bowen Island. One of these projects, the proposal to build a liquid natural gas facility on the shoreline of Howe Sound southwest of Squamish is seeking public comment on the project and its potential impact on the environment. If the facility is built, at least three LNG tankers would bypass Bowen Island every month.
