A Taste of Far Worse Things to Come? Port Metro Vancouver Fire.

It's a scary feeling.  You glance out your office window overlooking the Port Metro Vancouver docks to see thick clouds of white smoke billowing your way.

That's what happened to my prospective son-in-law yesterday at his computer animation shop in a gentrified, former industrial building hard alongside the docks, right by the cranes.  He made a number of trips in his car ferrying his colleagues a safe distance from the fires.

They didn't know what it was, only that it was acrid and they wanted to get away as quickly as they could.  Vancouver Police phone lines were jammed so off they went.

They were lucky.  The container load of trichloroisocyanuric acid, while volatile and flammable, wasn't lethal.  Those exposed mainly sustained burning eyes and throats.  And they could see and smell the smoke.

This is nothing compared to what could lie in store if when a supertanker full of dilbit goes down in the treacherous Second Narrows, spilling its cargo into Burrard Inlet or Coal Harbour.  Experts warn that the diluent, mixed into the bitumen, would separate and rise to the surface where it would form into very toxic clouds of invisible and generally undetectable gas.  Undetectable, that is, until someone breathes it.  Then the people of Vancouver and the North Shore would have a real disaster on their hands.