Companies fined $285,000 over water spill into North Saskatchewan

Wow, just wow.

Shit like this is actually strangely common. My old workplace was undergoing an upgrade and an idiot with a jackhammer was going through concrete in the furnace room, which also happened to be the home of the breaker panel, he went through almost every line in the building forcing them to re-feed it all. One of the other guys at the site told me about some company that took out a line that crippled a banking network.

Call before you dig.... How hard is it?

We had a guy with a backhoe cut thru an oil pipeline - the oil spill reached the water, tho it was not very big. (I'm sure Burrard Inlet is plenty polluted already). Shit happens. The people responsible for it have to make it as right as possible, but it's not as if we'll ever be able to prevent all incidents.

It's actually pretty common for those guys to be off by a couple feet from time to time. In those cases the marking company pays the fine.

I feel the fine should have been for not following their own procedures (which they didn't) and for failing to call before they dug (which they didn't do) and not for the water hitting the river.

The residual chlorine of that water was toast when it came into contact with the ground, never mind when it eventually went into the river.

When I read the article this morning, I was shocked by the amount of the spill (up to 12 million litres over 45 minutes) but then I wondered about the river itself. I did a quick pencil check and the results showed that the effect that leaked water would have on the North Saskatchewan river passing that point would be virtually nada.

Yeah... these kind you can.