Whales, and maybe disaster, headed for Robson Bight

We'll start with the assumption that no one in government actually hates the whales.

Nobody really wants the sunken fuel truck to rust out and send 12,000 litres of diesel glooping up to the surface of Robson Bight.

It doesn't matter what the intent is, though. If political foot-dragging results in fuel fouling the internationally renowned killer whale preserve, the damage will be the same. Then you'll see some warp-speed butt-covering, people displaying the kind of get-'er-done resolve heretofore unassociated with this file.

It has been 10 months since a barge tipped 11 pieces of logging equipment into the water, 30 kilometres down Johnstone Strait from Port McNeill. The way things are going, it could be another 10 months before the gear is hauled to the surface. That has everyone holding their breath, thinking of that corroding fuel truck.

"What happens if it leaks in August when there are 50 or 100 whales around?" asks Jim Borrowman. He's on the phone from Telegraph Cove, where he runs Stubbs Island Charters, the whale- and wildlife-watching company.

He's usually pretty circumspect, knows the workings of government well enough that he doesn't like to unload on its practitioners, but on this occasion he has a hard time keeping the anxiety out of his voice.

"The window is narrowing literally by the day now," he says. It might, in fact, be closed already. It's hard to predict, but the northern resident killer whales could show up in Robson Bight any day now. Once they arrive, it will be too late to raise the truck for fear the fuel spills during the move.

Alas, so far all that has been raised is the question of why this is taking so long. The barge dumped its load Aug. 20, 2007. (Pause here to wonder what it was doing there in the first place.)

The coast guard, armed with a report that estimated the fuel truck had been crushed on the way down, declined to inspect the wreckage. In fact, it wasn't until December that government, goaded by groups like Greenpeace and the Living Oceans Society, which had begun fishing into their own wallets to hire a submersible, took an underwater look. Surprise, surprise, there was the truck, 350 metres down, upright and uncrushed.

It then took until April for Ottawa and the provincial government to jointly announce they would spend up to $1 million to clean up the mess. It was May when salvagers were invited to bid on the job, which included pulling up all 11 pieces of equipment, including a container holding 1,190 litres of hydraulic fluid in pails. The deadline for those proposals was June 4. Three outfits ended up vying for the work. The Environment Ministry hopes a decision will be announced next week -- just as the whales are due to arrive.

Among the many adjectives used to describe government, "nimble" is not near the top of the list.

The province's request for proposals, recognizing the tight timelines, asked salvagers to devise two plans, one in which the work would be done in June, the other in October. But wait, says Borrowman, the orcas still hang around in the fall. "October is not a good month," he says. "There could very well be heavy activity well into December." By then the weather would be too snotty for the salvagers to work. It might not be safe to do the job until spring of 2009. Gulp.

Up in Sointula, Living Oceans executive director Jennifer Lash says there's no use dwelling on what might have been had officialdom's response been faster. "We can gripe all we want, but we have to keep moving." If the salvage work must wait until fall or later, she wants to see a monitoring program and a response plan in place, just in case the fuel is freed. No use crying over spilt milk, so let's prepare for spilled diesel instead.

If there's good news, it's that the A30 family of orcas have been spotted near Gil Island (which, you might recall, is where the Queen of the North sank). Researchers had been worried about the A30s, as the whales had passed through the fuel slick that fouled the surface after the barge tipped.

Happily, all of the animals have been accounted for. They appear to be heading south, which could put them in Robson Bight in matter of days, seeing as how whales move much faster than government.