Which Is The Terror Component Here?

Who's the terrorist here, anyway? Kind of like the chicken or the egg, and which came first conundrum. Around Dawson Creek and elsewhere in rural British Columbia with the gas and oil boom, it most certainly depends on whether you're a home- and land-owner, or whether you're a functionary for the giant corporations who build those infrastructures that draw natural gas and other petroleum commodities out of the ground.

There's money to be made in them thar hills and valleys. But sour gas, when it's especially virulent in doses of greater than 200 ppm hydrogen sulphide has an unsavoury reputation as a killer. It attacks the respiratory system of unwary or simply unlucky people, and either makes them very ill, or in the worst-case scenario, kills, in a matter of seconds.

Little wonder that farmers and homesteaders are irate that developers can place those wells where they please.

Little wonder that farmers like Alberta's Wiebo Ludwig, fought a long battle with developers, trying to protect his property, but more importantly, the health of his family, and resorted, through sheer unadulterated frustration, to oilpatch bombing and vandalizing. Charges that stuck, and cost him his freedom, when he spent over a year incarcerated, post-trial.

Now, near a remote northern British Columbia town, a mysterious duo of explosive devices were set off under sour-gas pipelines, the property of Encana Corp. In neither case was the pipeline ruptured, and the company took immediate steps to shut down the leaking pipelines.

Encana is Canada's largest oil and gas company. The explosives were laid under a line carrying deadly hydrogen sulfide.

Someone, or some undercover group is decidedly unhappy at the company's presence, and the investigating authorities can take their pick among the many groups who have attempted in the past to protest against its presence, endangering the land and the population with its poisonous gas extraction. Residents are wary and worried about the presence of the well sites.

They're located wherever the company seems to feel it has the right to place them. And there are no laws in the province to prevent Encana from doing just that. In fact, the law is on their side; what they're doing is considered perfectly legitimate. Residents' fears about the toxic effects of sour gas somehow get overlooked in the extraction equation.

A well exists a stone's throw from a community elementary school. Residents of Tomslake, some 30 kilometres south of Dawson's Creek, have protested at the development of sour-gas wells in their neighbourhood, with the knowledge that hydrogen sulphide-tainted natural gas is a direct threat to the health and lives of their children, themselves and their livestock.

The Kelly Lake Cree Nation has also expressed its concern over the presence of oil and gas drilling on their traditional lands, for years. They've conducted peaceful protests against the development and it's gained them nothing. An anonymous warning letter sent to the Dawson Creek Daily News on the 10th of October referred to the danger the pipelines represented.

It gave a deadline of the following day for "EnCana and all other oil and gas interests" to close down operations near the community of Tomslake, insisting they had no intention to "negotiate with terrorists" in their "crazy expansion of deadly gas wells in our home lands." Residents are puzzled, as to the identity of the writer and fearful of the violence.

But their concerns about the presence of the pipelines are well founded. Their quality of life has been abducted in the interests of energy groups' extraction and export of Canada's natural petroleum based resources. Good farmland has been impacted, farmers' livelihoods endangered, and residents' health potentially compromised.

When the concentration of hydrogen sulphide is slighter than merely deadly it can cause a phenomenon termed a 'knockdown'. Unwary well operators can stumble into leaks and collapse from the toxic effects. Several pipeline workers are known to have died from sour gas exposure in the past.

The Workers Compensation Board admits that four to five knockdowns are known to occur annually. This is not something the industry is fond of discussing. But the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health considers sour gas a common cause of sudden death in the industry.

Low-level exposure is capable of causing neurological damage, reproductive disorders, and it's suspected also of being a carcinogen. It's not an area closely studied by scientists. Obviously, the industry hasn't offered to fund scientific investigation into the matter.

And Canada is very serious about its resource extraction industries. Government at the federal and provincial levels would far prefer to believe that nothing amiss will result in the processing allied with extraction. The RCMP anti-terrorism Integrated National Security Enforcement Team has taken over the investigation into the explosions from local policing authorities.

Small communities seem to be helpless to protect themselves from the incursion of large corporations which have the protection of government because their business represents an important revenue source for international trade.

The quality of life for area residents becomes severely degraded. They live in constant fear and uncertainty of the potential for dire illnesses befalling them and their children.

In other words, they live in a state of low-grade terror. Something's dreadfully awry in our value system here.