Submitted by Friends of the San Juans

Islanders are invited to take part in a county-wide Salish Sea Stands day of action on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Monday, Jan. 16 against the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion. The Trans Mountain pipeline, owned by Kinder Morgan, received approval from the Canadian government to proceed. The project will affect the Salish Sea by radically increasing the number of tankers transporting crude oil in our waters.

The San Juan event will be held at the Juan County Park boat launch at noon.

You can also join in on the inter-island ferry for a teach-in and letter writing opportunity, starting on the 12:25 p.m. westbound sailing from Orcas.

For more details visit www.facebook.com/salishseastands or call Liza at 378-3586. Please wear black, the color of an oil spill. Bring kayaks and signs.

The expansion of Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline endangers our region. They are projected to nearly triple capacity of the existing pipeline from 300,000 to 890,000 barrels of tar sands crude oil a day— increasing vessel traffic through the Salish Sea seven-fold, with each tanker holding more than 25 million gallons of oil.

Some of this product is slated for export through BP’s dock at Cherry Point. The Army Corps of Engineers is supposed to be evaluating the environmental impact of this dock, but it’s dragging its feet. We need to demand that the Corps of Engineers release the final environmental impact study for BP’s tanker dock and shine a light on BP’s impacts to our shared U.S. and Canadian waters, the Salish Sea.

The environmental study for the dock should reveal that the permit BP is using for this expansion was issued illegally and that their plans are dangerous.

BP’s dock enables far more oil tanker traffic than permitted by a 1977 law written by Senator Warren Magnuson — at least 190 more tanker calls a year to the BP refinery. That’s a recipe for disaster in a fragile waterway already crisscrossed by thousands of ships bound to ports in Washington and British Columbia each year carrying diluted bitumen tar sands oil as cargo. The U.S. and Canada do not have the technologies or capabilities to clean up a tar sands oil spill.

We are calling on the Army Corps of Engineers to release a Final EIS for the Cherry Point refinery tanker terminal immediately — limiting the tanker traffic to no more than the number that called on the refinery before the second dock was built in compliance with Magnuson.