Thank you, Mr. Kamp. It's a very good question.
In fact, this is quite a large project for the coast guard. This ship, as you mentioned, sank in 1956, so that is 67 years ago. The question is, why now? Why are we looking after it now?
The coast guard became aware of some leakage from the ship back in 2003. The first time, we hired specialized divers, who went down and plugged the holes, so to speak—there were rivets coming out—with epoxy, and that was fine.
Since 2003 we have had increased surveillance and monitoring by the first nations in the environment, especially the Gitga'at, who live in Hartley Bay, who have consistently told us when there were further leaks. Back in 2011-12, there were further leaks. In 2012 alone, we had to go in three times, and we spent about half a million—$550,000—just to close those leaks.
We hired a specialized salvage company to assess the hull earlier in 2013, and they gave us an assessment in March that said basically any time soon you could see a catastrophic failure, which would lead to a major environmental spill in the area of bunker C, which is this very nasty, dark black tar-like roof tar that was used at that time to make the engine work. We built a case following that to get down there to get the oil out of this vessel. The government gave us the money and we're going to access the money through supplementary estimates (B).
Your next question was why the $46 million. This is the budget that we had established at the beginning. There are a number of contingencies as part of that amount. I do not think, at this point in time, we will need the whole amount. In fact, I think we should be around $30 million—not likely above this, but it could be a bit. We still have a lot to do to demobilize.
Your next question was when the operation was going to end. We are now getting towards the end. The diving started at the end of October. We started to pump oil. The first weeks of diving were to prepare the site to assess exactly the quantity of bunker C in the hull. There are many tanks and the ship is upside down on a bank in Grenville Channel. It is a very difficult area to get to and a very difficult place to dive because of the heavy currents due to the tide.
We assessed back then that we could have anywhere from 20 tonnes to over 100 tonnes of bunker C. As of this morning, we're at 37 tonnes of bunker C, which is a significant amount when you think that people report a spoonful or one-tenth of a litre to the coast guard. That's 37,000 litres of bunker C we collected, plus we have collected over 210,000 litres of oily water. We're at the point now where we're just recirculating water in the tank to make sure it's pretty clean. We have had divers in the last couple of days who have been cutting holes in the hull; they've been going in and really vacuuming the walls in the engine rooms. We're really making sure that we're cleaning it as much as we can.
By the middle of next week we hope to have finished collecting the oil, and then we will start demobilizing—dismantling, basically—the temporary installation that we have done around the Zalinski and return it to a normal state. But it's a large operation, and we're thankful to the government for that money to do it.