Thank you to the committee for having me.
The Rugged Coast Research Society is a Nanaimo-based registered charity developed to research remote coastal habitats and coordinate restoration efforts in sensitive ecological areas in partnership with local indigenous communities.
Rugged Coast was created in 2017. To date, we have surveyed 720 kilometres of B.C.'s west coast and removed approximately 70,000 kilograms of hazardous marine debris from some of the most unforgiving locations on the west coast of Vancouver Island. We are a member of the B.C. marine debris working group and have created many meaningful partnerships up and down the coast with our first nations partners.
In 2021, we were part of the CCCW-funded cleanup projects, and hired approximately 80 crew members up and down the west coast of Vancouver Island to participate in shoreline cleanup and debris accumulation research projects. The scope of our projects was from Bamfield, British Columbia, to the southern tip of Brooks Peninsula. These cleanups were based on high accumulation points with cultural significance to local first nations, as well as sensitive ecological areas.
This is how we operate: We look at areas that are in close proximity to open headlands and high collection areas, based on known hot spots up and down the coast and also with close proximity to local first nations food fisheries area, looking at contaminate transport from microplastics into bivalves and into the food web.
On our involvement in the Zim Kingston spill, Renny Talbot, our director, contacted incident command for Canadian Coast Guard letting them know that we had the crews. We had 15 highly skilled and trained crew members from the summer who were ready to go as soon as that first container made landfall.
Yet, there was a delay. We did not mobilize until November 5. We ended up meeting with a bunch of the other non-profit organizations that conduct shoreline cleanups. These non-profit organizations have been conducting multi-million dollar cleanup projects. We have the experience to conduct them in a cost-effective manner.
When we went up to the coast, we were joined with Living Oceans Society, Surfrider Foundation, Ocean Legacy, and we met Epic Exeo, which was already on the ground. What ensued after this were 4.3 metre tides, large waves and a storm surge. A lot of this debris that was on the shore ended up washing back into the ocean and becoming redistributed along the coast. A lot of the fridges were smashed apart.
I just went down.... We were up in the Scott Islands doing a reaccumulation survey, which was in no way funded through the government. This was external funding that we found. We found quite a bit of Zim Kingston debris in an area that has not been surveyed to our knowledge.
One of the biggest gaps that we found was a lack of consultation with the groups that were responsible for the majority of the cleanups over the last decade. We have experience, and we are often operating on a very, very limited budget. However, last year we had a significant budget and we were able to clean up a lot of this coast.
Our contact with Amix, the prime contractor, was very limited. Renny Talbot reached out as soon as the container made landfall and we were made aware that Amix was the prime contractor. We were offered some expenses to travel up north. We went up as a volunteer task force of about 15 people from among the five organizations. There was a crew that was being paid quite high wages, too, and they weren't specialized in shoreline cleanups. We could have mobilized almost 100 folks in our volunteer network to respond before that November 5 high tide.
There were very limited resources and no safety briefing from Amix—nothing. We had to do that all on our own, and we have the capacity to do that.
Epic Exeo actually asked, “Hey, can we have some resources and use some helicopter time?” They said, “We know this coast inside and out and we know the collector beaches.” Not until then did we finally get a bit of helicopter time, and we were moved along on that Saturday and Sunday at their response, but it did take some poking and prodding. As the weekend went on, we determined that for a lot of these beaches we cleaned, we had a huge crew up there. That wasn't being used very effectively, so we decided to mobilize back home and go back to our day jobs.
Post-cleanup involvement has included many meetings within the B.C. marine debris working group and outside of the B.C. marine debris working group with a passionate group of individuals. We have been contracted by an external source to collect data and to collect a representative dataset that shows the extent of this spill. In some of the monitoring that has been going on—we don't see the whole picture—it appears, seemingly to us, that the easily walkable beaches are being checked and debris is being stashed, sometimes below the high-water mark, and left out there for days and weeks at a time.
Then what happens—