The Sea to Sky gondola and/or the restaurant/lodge is powered by a diesel generator. This is a rather noisy thing you can hear throughout the area. My concern is that next to it are a couple of large fuel tanks, presumably containing diesel. They have no containment berms, so any spill would just head down the mountain.

(The downhill area at Cypress has similar tanks, and after a spill into Eagle Creek about 20 years ago, they built a containment system.)

There's also a large propane tank in the area. And what may be a huge underground reservoir for black and grey water.

So they're doing the bare minimum, resulting in potential for big environmental impact, no surprise there. I'm curious what the regulations state, surely there has to be some contingency, especially when dealing in such an important mountain eco-system (the very reason the attraction exists in the first place).

Yeah that's stupid of them, its even in their best interest for purely selfish reasons to have a backup containment system.

you should contact them direct and post their reply instead of just assuming that nothing has followed their set regulations.

I'm willing to bet that it is a double walled tank. Built in secondary containment.

Exactly...

Have you contacted ISL engineering, JRS engineers and the planning authorities before shooting your mouth off about 'bare minimum' efforts on the project? Have you actually been up there? So go on, contact the above entities and ask them about environmental compliance. We're all ears.

Better yet, head up there and stand in admiration of the cantilevered viewing platform and the suspension bridge (designed by ISL engineers). These are works-of-art and are likely to be nominated for engineering/design awards. Just do something to find some good in these remarkable engineering/design efforts.

$22 million of private money, on-time, on-budget and achieving near universal acclaim is something to celebrate, not denigrate. To suggest this group has done the bare minimum is, quite frankly, ignorant.

Contacted them yesterday. They are double-walled tanks, as per requirements.

well good. I'm an idiot for assuming they weren't.

If you actually did that (I'm not suggesting otherwise), you should get the CT 'gold star' for common sense.

Come to think of it, you may have introduced a novel concept to CT, ie. checking things out first instead of using a public forum to immediately crap all over the motives and professionalism of a company, the planning authorities, the design engineers and project managers.

They have an email contact address. Took 40 seconds. It's the interwebs: why speculate when you can communicate?

I don't doubt they meet all requirements. We all know how stringent such requirements are. That doesn't prevent them from doing more. Even double-walled tanks can be punctured, and double walls do not protect against failure of other fittings or human error during refueling. A berm is just so easy to provide relative to the consequences, even if a spill is unlikely.

Can you provide a scenario where double-walled tanks are punctured.....just so I understand the likelihood of that happening.

terrorists......just saying

What happens if a bermed tank is breached during a rain storm, you have a spill anyways. They are a constant maintenance issue, especially in an area with high rainfall such as the west cost of BC. You have to pump the water within the berm into an oil-water separator, which again requires constant maintenance and is open to human error.

<s>I don't know about BC / Canada, but in the US, a double walled tank meets all the requirements that a berm does, both for the EPA in a company's Spill Prevention, Countermeasures, and Control plan, and for MSHA (and presumably OSHA) for fuel storage.</s>

Edit: I misread your double negative. Thought you said "I doubt they meet..."