I got a gal(lon) in Kalamazoo
July 31st, 2010
“If there was a spill in this region it could affect the tributories of the Fraser River” -
Karen Campbell, Pembina Institute, interviewed on CBC Radio One’s As it Happens
The titanic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has underscored the inherent, but still comparatively low risks of the international oil economy. Regardless, the sheer scale of the spill has proven to be a nightmare for the industry and a boon for industry opponents of all varieties.
In one of the countless anti-industry media reports, As it Happens interviewed the aforementioned lawyer from the left-leaning Pembina think-tank. Her verbal slip - which might be a real word for “praise a conservative” - was planted in the middle of singularly alarmist rhetoric. She suggested that the latest oil industry mishap, in Michigan, was ample proof that no oil pipeline should be built from the Alberta oil sands across central B.C. to an export terminal at Kitimat. In the interest of fairness, the CBC neglected to interview anyone in favour of the pipeline.
A related trend, which in a way is a recurring Stupidism, is the reporting of oil spills in litres or gallons. So it was that the Michigan spill, awful though it is, was reported as being “more than three million litres.” While three million litres is certainly not small, it is one of those big numbers people have a hard time imagining. It just sounds really big.
A friend of the blog, being a little too smart for his own good, wondered how many litres might be in something imaginable - like an olympic swimming pool. Given that areas are often given in X number of football fields (so people can visualize the size better), this seemed like a reasonable question.
Given that such a pool is 25 metres wide, by 50 metres long and two to four metres deep (let’s say an average of three), that amounts to 3,750,000 litres. So the spill in Kalamazoo is around the amount of oil that would fill an olympic swimming pool. Not small, but certainly not something one would want to report.
