Nautical scientists and other ship enthusiasts may want to stroll over to Ogden Point where a Norwegian-built anchor handler is being converted into the largest spill-response vessel in Canada.

The 74.5-metre (244-foot) K.J. Gardner will be docked in Beecher Bay early in the new year and will patrol the BC coastline in the event of an oil spill.

“This is strictly as a result of commitments that Trans Mountain made to the federal government as part of their (pipeline) project,” said Michael Lowry, a spokesman for Western Canada Marine Response Corp. (WCMRC), the company that leased the ship and would undertake spill recovery operations. 

Under Transport Canada guidelines, the petroleum industry is required to fund spill response. 

Multi-party business arrangement includes local First Nations

The ship arrives as part of a partnership between Kotug International—a Dutch maritime towage company that plans to open an office in Victoria next year—and Horizon Maritime Services, a St. John’s, NL-based firm that provides vessels and offshore service.

Last spring, that partnership—Kotug Canada—signed a mutual benefits agreement (MBA) with the Sc’ianew First Nation to supply training and provide an operational base and floating dock at Beecher Bay.

The K.J. Gardner will be refitted with approximately $6 million worth of spill response equipment, at a cost of approximately $400K.

The diesel-fuelled ship is getting an offshore Vikoma boom, a Current Buster sweep system, and a Triton 150 skimming system, all industry-leading components in the oil cleanup business.

“This is going to be the largest asset for oil-spill response in Canada,” said Kyle Hujdick, WCMRC Beecher Bay base operations manager.

The idea is to cut down on the time it takes to get to a spill

Once deployed early in the new year, the K.J. Gardner will be able to significantly decrease the time it takes to arrive at the scene of an oil spill.

Historically, the Transport Canada-mandated response window has been as wide as 36 hours for smaller spills and 72 hours for the bigger ones. But the new vessel will shut that window significantly.  

“Our new commitment is a maximum six-hour response in those shipping lanes, and this is a key vessel to make sure that happens,” said Lowry, referring to the ocean highway running from the Port of Vancouver to Port Renfrew.

That’s six hours max. Lowry said the optimal response time of one hour remains the goal, depending of course, on where the emergency is.

“When you cut down response times, you get to the spill site faster, you can contain the oil faster, and it’s a much better way to mitigate the impact of the damage of that spill,” Lowry said.

The ship will play the role of seaway fire truck in the event of a nautical disaster of the petroleum variety and will provide a sense of pride, and employment in Beecher Bay, where there is a lot of ship traffic. 

Sc’ianew First Nations wanted a quicker response time

“Beecher Bay found out we were 72 hours away from spill response and that was not good enough,” said Sc’ianew First Nation Chief Russ Chipps.

“We figured that the damage would be done, our food would be lost—and we’re the salmon people, if we lost our food, how could we maintain that salmon-people culture?”

Beecher Bay sits just minutes from the Race Rocks lighthouse, the heavily traveled ‘roundabout’ for ships headed down to Puget Sound and Vancouver, so Sc’ianew elders initiated the idea of becoming more involved in the case of a spill, Chipps said.

“To me, I think that’s the most dangerous spot, where everybody’s crossing each other,” Chipps said.

He added that it’s a point of pride that should there be a spill, some of the “fins in the water” will be First Nations. “I feel we’re ready if there’s a spill, we’re going to be standing there, not on the shore anymore.”

The reason this diesel-fuelled ship is causing such a stir is due to its ability to suck up and store a shipload of oil—up to one million litres of it. “So its primary focus is to be able to take oil from one of our other assets that’s collecting the oil,” Hujdick said.

The first objective when arriving at the scene of a spill is to contain it, so the vessel is equipped with 4K feet of Vikoma offshore containment boom. For recovery, there’s a North Vancouver-built Triton 150 skimming system, part of the industry-leading equipment found onboard. 

The just-installed Current Buster Six sweep system, with integrated pump-out component, is another way the ship can recover oil spilled into the sea. 

“This piece of equipment allows this vessel to what we call ‘sweep’ but perform a collection and containment operation by towing a sweep of boom behind and off to the side of the vessel,” Hujdick said. 

“It’ll collect the oil into a containment pocket and be able to offload that oil from the sweep system into its holding tanks without the need of a support vessel.”

Dry-docked in Norway before it arrived at Ogden, the ship had been used to tow icebergs on Canada's east coast and to install offshore windmills near Scotland. It was originally designed to service offshore oil platforms, so it’s not a ship usually seen in these parts because as Lowry said, “we don’t have that industry on the west coast.”

This ship is big, powerful, and named after the company's president

The ship is named after Kevin Gardner, president of WCMRC, who sails into retirement in the coming weeks. It was built in Norway in 2009 and purchased by Trans Mountain, which won’t say how much it paid for it—loose lips sink ships and all that—but it’s estimated the price tag falls in the $20-$25M range.

The K.J. Gardner is one of 88 ships WCMRC has in BC, including coast response vessels, which are 85 feet long, about one-third its size.

It can pull 200 tons and tow anything from oil rigs to icebergs with its massive winches—huge spools of four-inch steel cables, 1,500 metres long.

The ship is DP Class 2, which refers to dynamic positioning, and means the ship can ‘station keep’ with ‘full redundancy.’ That’s sea-talk for it has the technology to remain stable at a spill site and won’t be moved much by waves or the current.

The tiny DP and winch controls are not dissimilar to a video game joystick, easily manipulated with nothing more than the finger of a crewmember positioned in the futuristic-looking wheelhouse or bridge, which faces the stern. 

“It’s easier looking backward because you have a complete overview of the entire deck and you can see exactly what you’re doing,” said Serguei Koutaitsev, the ship’s chief officer.

Two Beecher Bay First Nations women are expected to be part of its crew of 12-26 people which will work in shifts of 28 days on and 28 days off.

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