Public Hearing - EISs for the Proposed Gateway Pacific Terminal ...

11/3/2012
1 What we noticed about it coming from the
2 East Coast is that it was clean. You could breathe
3 the air that didn't have a color. That was really
4 nice. And the waters were great and the orcas were
5 particular interesting, never seen them before, and
6 this is one reason we want to be here.
7 I notice that you've been listening to about
8 how the orcas are damaged by pollution and/or by
9 habitat change and by oil, potentially, and the
10 tankers will collide with rock or with another tanker,
11 it will happen, but that's a probability.
12 But a certainty is coal dust. Now, there
13 is -- about 35 miles from here there is the largest
14 North American coal terminal in this area, the whole
15 North America. It's called Roberts Bank Superport
16 coal terminal. It's just north of the U.S./Canadian
17 border, less than a mile, really close to Roberts
18 Point. And it's been in operation since 1970.
19 It's known to spill one and a half million
20 pounds of coal dust into the waters while they're
21 loading the tankers every year. So that's been 42
22 years of a million pounds a year. And it's smaller
23 than the one that's proposed at Gateway.
24 So if you want to study the effects of long
25 term coal dust on marine life, go to Roberts Point and
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