Bellingham Comments from Digital Recorder - EISs for the Proposed ...

GATEWAY PACIFIC TERMINAL EIS SCOPING HEARING VOL. II
COURT REPORTER: BETH DRUMMOND PROCEEDING DATE: October 27, 2012
Page 129
1 look at the cumulative impact of all -- of all the global
2 facilities on the West Coast, on vessel traffic in ballast
3 water, in particular.
4 Those are areas I don't have a lot of expertise
5 in, but all of the ships when you start tracking where
6 they'll go, they all go up the West Coast, the Pacific
7 Coast, that's the D.C. coast, up to one little tiny pinhole
8 pass, called Unimak Pass in the Aleutians.
9 And then they go on the inside of the Aleutians
10 by the Bering Sea in Bristol Bay a thousand miles out to the
11 other side of the Aleutian Islands, and then they come down
12 to all Asia, China, and everything.
13 That's the same thing for the tar sand ships that
14 are coming down from, proposed, Burnaby and other tar sands
15 to cruise ships. We're the ones that will pit that; if
16 there's an impact, it will all be in the same place.
17 Turns out, the impacts from these vessels are --
18 could be devastating to all the Pacific Northwest salmon
19 because all of the salmon when they spawn, they've got to go
20 down to Columbia River further south; all the smolts go up
21 to the Gulf of Alaska.
22 The research has been ten billion smolts a year
23 go there. If there's a collision between any of these coal
24 ships and the tar sand ships in that area or anywhere along
25 the way, which is very likely with that traffic being