A shipping company is baffled by a bogus entry in the government’s polluter database that blames one of its tankers for a monster offshore oil spill.
Now the company is demanding answers, and critics are questioning how environmental-enforcement officers can do their jobs when mock data is mixed with the real thing.
A classified database contains an entry that would be jaw-dropping if real. A tanker — the MT Overseas Fran — is blamed for spilling more than 100 million litres of crude oil somewhere off the coast of Newfoundland on June 18, 2007.
A spill of that magnitude would be on par with the giant BP disaster, which so far has spewed an estimated 75 to 150 million litres of crude into the Gulf of Mexico.
The government database cites “storm, flood” as the reason for the spill, while its cause is “unknown.” The entry shows cleanup took two days.
The Overseas Fran citation appears alongside thousands of other, real entries. The database gives no indication that it’s a phantom spill.
And the on-paper catastrophe was jarring news for officials who manage the tanker.
OSG Ship Management says the Overseas Fran was nowhere near Newfoundland at the time. The company says a logbook shows the ship was in the North Sea somewhere between Germany and Scotland.
“At that time, she was a long way from Newfoundland,” said Capt. Ian Blackley, head of OSG’s shipping operations.
The Overseas Fran had only been to Canada once between 2005 and 2009, he added, and never during the time frame of the database.
Blackley said OSG plans to ask Environment Canada to remove the bogus entry.
The federal government confirms the item is entirely fictitious.
“This was an operational, tabletop simulation exercise,” Environment Canada spokeswoman Ashleigh Wilson said in an email. “No product was released.”
No one from the department was available to explain why an exercise on paper was entered into the official environmental-enforcement database.
The mock entry alarmed at least one environmentalist.
“It’s problematic,” said Bill Montevecchi, a sea bird expert who teaches at Newfoundland’s Memorial University. “It’s not easy, but these things have to be accurate, they have to be truth, they have to be interrogated and they have to be triple-checked so we have this information.”
A senior response officer with the Coast Guard in Newfoundland said officials picked the Overseas Fran because they needed an example of a big tanker for their simulation. The ship is more than double the length of two football fields.
“The idea of that was, you just (weren’t) picking something out of the air,” Larry Crann said. “Say if you used a freighter, for example, well the structure of a freighter and the amount of product will be quite different from a tanker.
“So you want something real that you could be dealing with. So this is the reason why you would pick that type of vessel.”
The database is called NEMISIS, an acronym that stands for National Enforcement Management Information System and Intelligence System. Federal enforcement officers use the information to track and prosecute polluters and environmental lawbreakers.
It took The Canadian Press two years and a complaint to the information commissioner to obtain the data from Environment Canada under the Access to Information Act.
Many fields in the database are missing information, so it’s not always clear who is blamed for a spill, what was spilled, where it was spilled or how much was spilled.