Great to see that there was support out there for this ship and no damage was done for our beautiful coast line a true feather in the cap of our protectors for the coast line and a very good test to show that Endbridge can work with the proper safety protocols in place

This is a good news story, but people also have to remember that the safety protocols Enbridge is required to meet haven’t been implemented yet, and they won’t be until the pipeline is built.

If the tanker had run aground, I’m sure people would have used it as fodder to say why the pipeline shouldn’t be built, but it wouldn’t have been a fair assessment.

There are hundreds of ships that pass by our coasts every year. We should be prepared for situations like this. If this had happened off the central coast the response probably would have taken longer. We will be more prepared once Enbridge gets going but in the meantime more should be done.

A month or so from now when the big winds hit the open coast in November, this could well have been a very different story. They were fortunate that the winds blew off-shore long enough to keep this scow off the rocks. This is NOT an example of preparedness.

JohnnyBelt

This is a good news story, but people also have to remember that the safety protocols Enbridge is required to meet haven’t been implemented yet, and they won’t be until the pipeline is built.

If the tanker had run aground, I’m sure people would have used it as fodder to say why the pipeline shouldn’t be built, but it wouldn’t have been a fair assessment.

I am very glad to see that this incident didn’t turn into a catastrophic event. As for “protocols” why wouldn’t we have one in place already? Isn’t there a 100 or more ships using these waters already? Seems foolish to wait until “EMBRIDGE” builds their pipeline before implementing safety policies and procedure around preventing catastrophic events.
Less we forget. Wondering what type of protocol was in place at the Fukushima power plant? How many more disasters can or oceans sustain? How many more mistakes can we bury in or oceans before our oceans no longer sustain life?
I am sorry J.B. I really don’t get your vision when it comes to EMBRIDGE!

Sounds to me like we should be thanking the Americans. Wasn’t there a post the other day about our Coast Guard being adequately funded to do the job? Doesn’t really seem so in this case.

The ‘Barbara Foss’ is a privately owned American ocean going tug, NMG. In years past, privately owned Canadian ocean going tugs participated in many similar high seas rescues, some under far worse conditions than attended here. I don’t know that the US Coast Guard even has any vessels of its own that are designed to be tug boats, so why would the Canadian Coast Guard?

Listen to the dippers trying to create a sliver of negativity from this event. Uh-no..the Coast Guard is funded just fine. They towed the stricken vessel 46 km out to sea with nothing but a tow rope and determination. Not unlike a police car using its push bar to remove a stricken vehicle that dies in the middle of a busy freeway.
He isn’t going to push it to the nearest repair facility, that is what a tow truck company is for. Makes sense that once the danger was averted by towing it out to sea, or a safer area, a private tug boat company can haggle with the Russian owners for the HUGE TOW BILL. Rather than the Canadian taxpayer being left on the hook.
So easy to understand…?

Why should the Coast Guard not be equipped to guard the coast? Is that a serious question?

Guard the coast against… very broad statement NMG. Against invaders? Against smugglers? Against cruise ships dumping waste? Against vessels that lose power? Against boats in danger of sinking? Against drinking drivers and poachers? Against submarines? Against satellite surveillance? Against cruise missiles or nuclear warheads???

oh and against pirates?

Coast Guards have traditionally been more concerned with rescuing mariners in distress than in saving their vessels. To maintain a fleet of Coast Guard owned ocean going tugs always at the ready and solely dedicated to giving a tow to every tub that has engine trouble off our coasts would be about as cost-effective as having the RCMP in the tow truck business and fully equipped to tow any size or type of vehicle that breaks down or has an accident on the roadways.

There just are some things that the private sector can do better.

Physically, it could be done, and there may even possibly be some advantages, sometimes, in certain situations. But under the current way we account for government provided services financially it’s simply not feasible to do that ~ and it’s highly doubtful it would be in this instance even if we accounted for those same things properly.

Based on the mission and mandate that is listed on their website, I’d say most of those would be covered off, including pirates.

I’m not so sure about satellite surveillance and with submarines, it would probably depend on their motive. Cruise missiles or nuclear warheads I’m assuming come with evil intent, so I think they’d be covered off.

The ship was a freighter, not a tanker.

Thank god nothing catastrophic came of this. Hopefully this is a eye opener for what could happen if Embridge manages to get there way with the pipe line project. We as a human race have to start looking at reducing the impact on our oceans. We still have no idea what the long term effects will be on our oceans with the Fukushima power plant disaster. The human race relies on our oceans for sustenance without the marine life we will all parish leaving oil and power useless to us all. People have to stop being blinded by needs and greed, life is short people have to start looking out for our future generations instead of living in the now.

That argument won’t hold, Maverick 1965. Not that you’re necessarily wrong, which I don’t personally believe you are. But we have ingrained notions about ‘money’, and that it accurately and always REFLECTS physical realities completely. And we will not believe otherwise. Even if ‘otherwise’ could be shown to be more correct.

So, as the saying goes, “…for future generations”, not to mention our own, we believe we need the ‘money’ that Enbridge will bring in now. And that will trump all the other environmental arguments that can be made against it, whether they’re valid, (which a few or them may well be), or not.

We believe, a good many do anyways, that we cannot do without it. Or getting ‘money from something similar, where we are enabled, (or so we expect to be), to always export more than we import, and somehow enrichen ourselves through this process.

Lost on us, it seems to be, that if your country is continually shipping out more real wealth than what it is importing in alternate real wealth, and only getting ‘money’ for the difference, we are physically getting ‘poorer’ not ‘richer’. Even though the financials may tell us otherwise. For never let us question if the ‘figures’ accurately reflect the ‘facts’, or any facts. For if they don’t, we’d have to trouble ourselves not to change the ‘figures’, but to try to ‘make the ‘facts’ conform to them. Since we all KNOW that any ‘figure’ with that dollar sign in front of it is one that’s set in stone.

If only it were so simple. But it isn’t. It’s exceedingly complicated, since we don’t really even have any accurate way to measure whether we’re really getting ahead, or falling behind. Not in ‘money’, at least. For we don’t really know just what, if anything, all this ‘money’ we thirst after is really going to BUY when it comes time for us to spend it. So we tell ourselves that we’re not going to ‘spend’ it, not all of it anyways, we’re going to ‘save’ it. Like the Norwegians. They’re supposed to know what they’re doing. We think.

We have never yet realised that when it comes to wealth itself , no one, no country, can ever be wealthy by what it ‘saves’, But only by what it ‘spends’. Has anyone ever got any ‘well-being’, (the original meaning of ‘wealth’) out of that roast of beef in your freezer while it’s in the freezer? Not to my knowledge. You can only get that after it’s been taken out of the freezer, thawed, cooked, and eaten. There’s not a whit of nourishment that leads to your ‘well-being’ in it otherwise.

But we persist in trying to believe otherwise. And get irritated if these far more accurate ‘inconvenient truths’ than any associated with global warming are ever mentioned. We have an ingrained mentality of ‘scarcity’. Not because there really is any material scarcity anymore ~ and science and technology continue to push those real scarcities that might have existed at some times in the past so completely out of existence that a far greater problem today is how to constrain the glut of everything we’d be buried under if we even utilised all the productive capacities we already have. But because we have a scarcity of ‘money’. Mere figures. Which, with all of our modern wisdom, we still believe are something similar to things governed by the laws of nature.

Imagine that!
The sky didn’t fall on all you chicken littles.
It’s time to wake up and start realizing that we live in a world where you can’t control everything.

I agree with a lot of which you have stated “socredible” spending money is great to sustain a healthy economy.

Embridge will stimulate the economy for a short while, a few will stand to prosper a great deal. I could look at things in a selfish manner by saying it doesn’t matter to me given my age I will most likely be dead by the time things fall apart. Unfortunately I care about what my off spring will have to endure. Our prairie land is already stripped of its nutrients to replace the nutrients we are using by-products from oil and gas to replenish our soil, when the oil is gone then what?

Our oceans are already compromised 30 yrs ago fish were abundant I remember fishing as a young adult in awe as to how quickly we would fill our coolers with cod, halibut, salmon, prawns and crab. Not so much now!

I read how man kind uses our oceans as a dumping ground “out of sight out of mind” attitude. Ask yourself, would you defecate in your soup pot before cooking your soup?

So personally I hope I am not around to see what may lye a head for our not so future generation. Watching as my children slowly starve to death is an image I would rather not see.

Maverick ever give any thought to all those nukes that where exploded in the oceans? We seem to still be here.

Ever wonder seamut how high the Cesium levels get before life ceases to exist in our oceans?