Protests against Kinder Morgan’s planned expansion of its Trans Mountain pipeline to carry raw bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands to its Westridge marine terminal in North Burnaby landed in Port Moody Thursday morning.
A group of about 15 to 20 protesters, some of them carrying banners, blocked the access road to Reed Point Marina from the Barnet Highway beginning at 6 a.m.
One of the protest organizers, David Mivasair, said members of his group have been blockading the road entrance to the Westridge terminal for the past three weeks to try to prevent workers and equipment doing construction work at the facility. But when the workers stopped arriving, the protesters started investigating how they might be skirting their blockade.
“It was a bit like cops and robbers,” he said.
Their search led them to Reed Point, where, Mivasair said it’s believed workers were boarding small ferries to get to the terminal by water. He said the group also deployed canoes into the Burrard Inlet in an attempt to block any workers already on the water.
Mivasair said Port Moody police did attend the scene briefly and no workers tried to get past their blockade.
A woman who answered the phone at the marina said she had no comment about the protest.
Mivasair said it was too soon to commit whether members of his group would establish a regular presence at Reed Point as they have on Bayview Drive at the Westridge terminal entrance.
“If they see us, obviously they’ll go somewhere else,” he said. “Many of us are very eager to put a stop to this destruction of the environment.”
Later Thursday, the protesters took their eagerness to the Brunette interchange at Highway 1 where several of them tried to stop a drilling operation related to the pipeline project.
One protester appeared to lock herself to a drilling rig with a bicycle lock. RCMP at the scene were able remove her and she and another male were arrested.
