MERRITT, B.C. — There was a bustle of activity along the Nicola River in Merritt today, May 19, as Kinder Morgan Canada and local emergency management agencies conducted a mock oil recovery.
It was a chance for Kinder Morgan officials to test their procedures in the case of a Trans Mountain Pipeline leak.
Rob Hadden, Director of Operations for Kinder Morgan, said crews were responding to a scenario in which there was a release of oil in the Merritt area.
“We are pretending that happened and have our management team here to test what we would do if it really was a real life event,” Hadden said.
The exercise had three main objectives: to train staff, test plans, and coordinate a response.
“Quite a lot of logistics and planning went into putting this all together,” Hadden said. “I think there’s over 50 folks here in the incident command post, as well as we have other folks down in Merritt actually doing a boom deployment as well, practicing the same scenario.”
Two skimmers capture a mixture of crude and water, which gets pumped out of the river and taken offsite.
A decontamination station is set up to prevent oil from getting transferred from clothing and equipment to the natural landscape.
The training exercise is run as closely to a real life situation as possible.
“We’re certainly not going to put any real oil or anything else into the river, so we sort of have to pretend that part of it,” Hadden said, “but we put the boom in, the skimmers in, the equipment that we would have in the real life event is all there right to the point of actually recovering oil.”
A number of local agencies were called in to assist both at the spill site and at the Kamloops incident command post.
Sky McKeown with Merritt Fire Rescue said the situation was treated with much the same urgency as an actual spill.
“There are certain aspects of this that are 100 per cent real life simulation,” McKeown said. “One of the things that we did was a press conference, and we sat down and we had a panel of people interviewing us and throwing questions at us that we had no idea what they were going to be and we had to take some of our life experience, some of our training and apply it to those questions.”
It was a long day for those responding to the mock emergency. Kandis Lipsett with the B.C. Ministry of Environment began the exercise at 6:30 a.m.
“Real life situations happen any time of the day or night and having it so early really puts you in that mind fog so you can really feel the experience as it would be in a real situation,” she said.
Kinder Morgan holds a number of training exercises at predetermined spots throughout the year to be prepared for worst-case situations.
