Marine incident has Prince Rupert response team Haida Gwaii bound

A grounded barge near Queen Charlotte City
has launched a precautionary marine spill response protocol

See updates to this story at bottom of post

Details are still few and far between, but the grounding of a barge near Queen Charlotte City on Haida Gwaii has put in motion an environmental response program today.

As the reports of the grounding began to come in, local contractors on the Islands began staging equipment nearby.

At the same time, as part of the response, the Prince Rupert based West Coast Marine Response Corporation station, dispatched a skimming vessel from Cow Bay to the region as a precaution.

WCMRC assets from Prince Rupert will be part of a response to a
marine incident on Haida Gwaii 

The alert to the situation was first delivered through the WCMRC twitter feed this afternoon.

In the Mid morning period of Sunday, Environment Canada issued a Gale Warning for all areas of the North Coast and Haida Gwaii marine environment

Winds are expected to increase to Southeast 45 knots this evening, before diminishing to 30 knots by Monday morning

We will offer more updates on the incident and any other information related to it, as they become available.

Update:

The barge in question is a luxury fishing barge owned by the HaiCo company, it apparently broke loose and drifted from an anchor buoy near Alliford Bay to a location on Lina Island west of Queen Charlotte City, no guests were on board the barge at the time of the incident.

Of concern for those responding is the state of the containment for the fuel that is onboard the barge.

As part of the incident, the Coast Guard has established an exclusion zone and the Ministry of Environment continues to monitor the situation. The Federal agency outlined its plans through twitter Sunday afternoon.

On Sunday afternoon/evening the Village of Queen Charlotte Emergency Network page had three entries posted by 6:30 PM.

The incident has begun to receive provincial media attention, some of the stories can be found below:

Crews respond after luxury fishing lodge barge runs aground near Haida Gwaii
Fishing lodge barge drifts onto rocky Haida Gwaii beach
Floating lodge with fuel on board runs aground on Haida Gwaii
Canadian Coast Guard monitoring barge than ran aground in Haida Gwaii
Floating fishing lodge grounded on Haida Gwaii

For more items of note related to Emergency Responders in the Northwest see our archive page here.


To return to the most recent blog posting of the day, click here.