‘It is important for public confidence that operators are not seen as being rewarded or able to skip important regulatory requirements that are in place to ensure safety.’
VICTORIA — When the NDP government-appointed scientific panel on fracking visited B.C.’s Northeast last year, one eye-opener was a tour of “a large water storage structure, clearly identifiable as a dam.”
“It was observed at the large dam visited by the panel that there did not appear to be any spillway or outlet facility built with the dam,” the trio wrote in a draft version of their report. “Spillways/outlets are a critical component of a large earth dam to protect against overfilling and overtopping of the dam due to heavy precipitation, which can subsequently lead to a runaway process of erosion of the dam material, breach, and catastrophic failure.
“It’s very technical,” she told the legislature this week. “With 97 recommendations, over 200 pages, we owe it to British Columbians to make sure that we do our due diligence in analyzing that report so that we can deliver good public policy for all of B.C.” Back in 2013, the provincial government transferred the approval process for structures for storing fracking water from the Lands and Natural Resources Ministry to the Oil and Gas Commission.
The regulatory lapse was not discovered until 2016, at which time the commission was finally given specific authority to approve and inspect dams. But for all the regulatory improvements, there remain problems on the ground. The panel heard concerns about six new dams being constructed in the last two years, three with capacity of greater than 100,000 cubic metres of water and one rated at 200,000.
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