Miles before they hit the shore

Early last month, the Chief Oilman reassured the House, and the public, that their concerns about a BP-style disaster off the shores of Newfoundland were perhaps overblown:

PREMIER WILLIAMS: Mr. Speaker, the people of the Province can be assured that we will adopt the best practices in the world. As we come to this process now in the Gulf of Mexico, if there are any new devices or methodologies or technologies that are developed, we will make sure that they are adopted in our offshore. From our own perspective, the C-NLOPB is responsible primarily for any offshore problems. If it comes to any leakages or seepages that come from tankers or ship transports, then that is the responsibility, of course, of Transport Canada.

From our own perspective, as recently as this morning, we have looked at just exactly what the situations are in the North Atlantic. It is a general understanding that because the offshore sites are significantly offshore and well east of the Province that the situation that could arise in Orphan Basin or Jeanne d’Arc or the Flemish Pass is that there is a lower likelihood that oil would actually come ashore in Newfoundland and Labrador. Now, that is not to say that it would not.

As well, we are dealing with a heavy crude oil out there, so from a fishing perspective, there is less likelihood that it would affect the fishery although it would certainly affect the gear. However, having said that, I am not trying to minimize the circumstances under any situation, we will make sure that we monitor this very closely and that we adopt the best practices in the world.

Now, it is probably true that, given the prevailing winds and currents, the likelihood is low that oil would reach local shores from a blowout at an existing or planned offshore Newfoundland oil well.

But what about other offshore areas that are subject to CNLOPB rules and “best practices”?

While there have been gas finds in both the Gulf of St. Lawrence and offshore Labrador, there haven’t been commercially-viable oil finds. Yet.

And the prevailing winds and currents offshore Labrador, or in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, don’t offer the possibilities of the same rosy scenario for a future submarine blowout.

This map, generated at this pretty cool website, shows what the BP slick in the Gulf of Mexico would look like transposed to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.


(You can only use terrestrial locations to generate the map. This one uses Bird Rock, an uninhabited rock in the Magdalene Islands archipelago, as a reasonable facsimile of an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, not far from the putative maritime boundary between Newfoundland and Quebec.)

The putative slick extends from the northern tip of Cape Breton Island to Anticosti, from the Baie des Chaleurs between Gaspé and the Acadian Peninsula to Cape Anguille and the Port-au-Port Peninsula.

An event on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon, if it were to happen in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, would have a major environmental and economic impact on all five provinces which surround it.

An offshore Labrador disaster, well… perhaps you could put some stuff in the water to trace the currents and make them visible on a macro scale. That would help you to visualize stuff.

In the immortal words of the 2007 PC campaign theme song, “We can see the problems coming miles before they hit the shore.”