Thank you for the question.
In terms of the incident itself and how it rolled out, at 4:48 p.m., Pacific Time, on April 8, the coast guard received the report of pollution in Vancouver harbour. It was described as a sheen. Port Metro Vancouver tasked a vessel to go look at that sheen, and the coast guard sent a vessel to English Bay.
Concurrently, we alerted emergency management partners, including provincial and municipal authorities. We started the process of alerting immediately, and had informed all of our partners by 9 p.m. that evening.
Initial reports from the scene indicated unrecoverable sheen, and we didn't really have a good indication of what exactly the complexity of the situation was until we had photos from overflights. It was an aircraft of opportunity that saw something looking unusual on the water. It was a flat night. The sun was setting, and it was hard to see the oil, the substance, on the water.
We went to the anchorage and looked to see what vessel it could be. There was no gushing spill. It was a slow leak from what we now know to be the Marathassa. The tide was changing, so the substance was moving quite significantly.
We contacted the master of the Marathassa. He denied it was him. We ended up boarding the vessel and inspecting, but because of the nature of the actual problem on the vessel, it was difficult to determine who was leaking. By nine o'clock, we had determined that the situation was significant and contracted with the WCMRC, which is the response organization and the responsible party for oil spills in Vancouver harbour, to come out and start addressing the incident.
The way we attacked the problem was twofold. We started by skimming, because at that point we still didn't know it was the Marathassa. Skimming the substance that was sitting on the water surface ensured that the substance didn't reach the beaches and it prevented a significant problem on the shores.
Over the evening, despite the master's refusal to accept responsibility, we boomed the vessel; 1,520 metres of boom were used. We boomed and skimmed at night. That was the first time we had ever done that. WCMRC has recently invested in new equipment to allow them to operate at night. That was a first for Vancouver harbour.
An incident command post was set up. We had an incident commander on Wednesday evening. By 10 a.m., Pacific Time, we had an incident command post with all partners established in Port Metro Vancouver. By the end of the day, on the 9th, we had a unified command, which means the coast guard was sharing the decision-making of how we were going to attack the problem with every partner who wanted to be involved. At that point it was the Ministry of the Environment, Environment Canada, Transport Canada, several first nations, the City of Vancouver, other municipalities, and multiple private sector partners, including the people who respond to dangers to wildlife, birds, mammals, and fish.
We focused our operations on the high-impact areas, based on the information we had from Environment Canada. We work as a partnership. The coast guard is the operational arm. Environment Canada and Transport Canada regulate and provide scientific information to us.
Based on information on the scene, on Thursday the 9th Transport Canada began to identify that it was in fact the Marathassa. At this point the master was still denying it was him. We sent samples of the substance to a lab to determine what the vessel had on board versus what was in the water, and to ensure it was a match. At that point we were able to identify unequivocally that it was the Marathassa.
Through the unified command, we continued to coordinate response efforts until today. At the height of the response, we had 75 personnel in the incident command post, and 100 personnel working on the water and the shorelines.