Last weekend, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I saw Enbridge’s huge advert in The Vancouver Sun claiming its Northern Gateway project would make “B.C.’s North Coast safer for all vessels”.

The company must be cursing the timing of the terrible oil spill now reaching the shores of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Florida.

Enbridge’s proposal doesn’t involve an oil rig, but the spill demonstrates yet again what oil response experts have always said: once the oil is in the water, you’re hooped.

Anyway, this weekend I downloaded Volume 8A of Enbridge’s proposal to the National Energy Board – the volume dealing with marine transportation.

A lot of the info is simply background filler, and despite being 152 pages long, details are very sketchy.

For example, talking about the type of tankers to be used, Enbridge’s report notes: “At this stage of the project, there is limited information regarding marketing plans, trade routes, or details of potential charterers or their tankers and, as a result, specific plans or technical documents of the design ships cannot be provided.”

However, here are some the key parts of the plan, as described in the report.

How much extra traffic?

About 220 vessels per year would travel through Douglas Channel, an increase of 86 per cent compared to current traffic to Kitimat. At Wright Sound, the project-related tankers would cause a 13 per cent increase in reporting traffic. And at the Prince Rupert MCTS station, project-related tankers would cause an increase of 3 per cent for the total reporting traffic.

What route would the tankers take?

The tankers would use one of three main routes:

1. The Northern Approach (for tankers arriving from or departing to Asian ports). 158 nautical miles. Via Haida Gwaii through Dixon Entrance, Hecate Strait, Browning Entrance, Principe Channel, Nepean Sound, Otter Channel, Squally Channel, Lewis Passage, Wright Sound and Douglas Channel.

2. The Southern Approach (Direct) (for tankers arriving from or departing to west coast ports south of Kitimat) 98 naut. miles. Via Queen Charlotte Sound, Hecate Strait, Caamaño Sound, Campania Sound, Squally Channel, Lewis Passage, Wright Sound and Douglas Channel.

3. The Southern Approach (via Principe Channel), (in weather conditions where Caamaño Sound cannot be used) 133 naut. miles. This route goes via Hecate Strait, Browning Entrance, Principe Channel, Nepean Sound, Otter Channel, Squally Channel, Lewis Passage, Wright Sound and Douglas Channel.

What kind of tankers would be used?

Tankers calling at the Kitimat Terminal would, most likely, be chartered. They would all be double-hulled, due to international regulations requiring all tankers in international trade to be double hulled by 2010.

Most likely, Aframax or Suezmax tankers would carry condensate and the larger VLCC (supertankers) and Suezmax tankers would carry export oil cargo.

Pilots, escort and harbor tugs

Local pilots would board and assist all incoming and outgoing tankers. During good weather and in daylight, helicopters might be used to lower pilots onto the tanker.

A close escort tug would be used for all laden and ballasted (empty) tankers, beginning at the pilot boarding stations (Triple Island and proposed sites in Browning Passage and Caamaño Sound) to and from the marine terminal. The close escort tug would normally be positioned approximately 500 metres astern of the tanker, or as directed by the shipmaster or pilot during transit.

* A tethered tug, in addition to a close escort tug, would be used for all laden tankers in the Confined Channel Assessment Area (CCAA). The tug would be tethered to the stern of the laden tanker at all times, ready to assist with steering or slowing down.

* Three or four tugs for berthing and two or three tugs for unberthing the tanker. One of these tugs could also provide escort services.

Rescue tugs

At least one of the escort tugs would be equipped to provide ocean rescue capability and would be available to any ship in distress along the north coast of British Columbia.

Tanker speed

Average tanker speeds close to shore would be 8 to 12 knots: eight to 10 knots in confined areas and 10 to 12 knots in straight channel areas such as Principe Channel and Douglas Channel.

Navigation aids

Radar would be installed along important sections of the Northern and Southern Approaches to monitor all marine traffic and provide additional guidance to pilots and other vessels in the area.

* See my earlier post: What if a tanker heading for Kitimat hit another vessel?

Reaction to the proposal later this week

Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen runs six blogs and plays around a lot with different ads on her sites. “It takes a long time to earn money from a blog but it’s easy because it’s so much fun to put on different ads and experiment with what works,” she says.

Sylvia Taylor, executive director of the Federation of BC Writers, helps writers with their manuscripts and told me: “My authors all give me different nicknames: one calls me ‘The Literary Midwife’ and another calls me ‘Metaphora Editrix.’ ”.

A second story about the strong ties between Prince Rupert, B.C. and Memphis, Tennessee has also gone online:
Prince Rupert looks towards Memphis

A well-worn package arrived today from northern Nigeria.

The Fedex package looked lumpy, heavily inspected, with yellow and blue stickers and tape splashed with orange type declaring “Inspected by Canada Customs”.

The sender: W.J. Bush & Co. of Kano, Nigeria. The original company of W.J.Bush & Co. may no longer exist in East London, but perfume production is still going strong in Kano, northern Nigeria.

Several readers of my article “The Bint Factor”, published in Reader’s Digest Canada, had asked if they could buy Bint el Sudan in Canada.

The short answer is no, as it’s not made in North America, but an email to IFF’s Nick Evans worked wonders. Nick is International Flavors and Fragrances’s sales manager for Africa, and he arranged for 36 little bottles of the non-alcoholic perfume to be sent to me in Canada.

When I opened the package, three cardboard boxes appeared, surrounded by crunched-up transparent plastic. Looking for all the world like boxes at the hardware store holding screws or nails.

Each box bore the company label based on a photo taken by my grandfather E.E. Burgess in 1919. And inside the boxes are little bottles steeped in history.

I’ve just pulled out one of the little bottles, green in color, and can smell the distinctive scent on my fingers: strong, lingering and suprisingly pleasant. My grandfather always said the fragrance was too strong for European noses, but it seems pretty neat to me.

Now I just have to figure the best way to get some of the bottles to Nelson, Kamloops and Toronto…

Vancouver longshore worker Karen Crossan (pictured) stood in the ghostly dispatch hall looking vainly for work on tonight’s graveyard shift.

“I’m bored and I am broke,” she said, after learning there was no work that night, yet again. “There were 150 jobs for the afternoon shift, but only a few casuals got out.”

Crossan only comes in from Port Coquitlam twice a week nowadays looking for work, as it’s usually a wasted 40-minute trip each way. She last worked ten days ago.

In the first eight months of 2009, she clocked less than 300 hours work as a B Board casual in International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 500. This year, B Board casuals like Crossan will be lucky to make $30,000, compared with an average $70,000 last year.

The recession has hit the dockworkers in British Columbia hard, with work hours down by 600,000 hours or 17.6 per cent – the equivalent of 400 full-time jobs.

Container work has taken the biggest dive, and Vancouver’s Local 500 has seen a 23 per cent drop in work hours from January to the end of August 2009, year-on-year.

While full union members are surviving, the 1,200 casuals have suffered dramatically, especially on the lower boards. In Vancouver, A Board casuals get preference over those on B, C, T and OO Boards and the numbers speak for themselves.

According to Gordie Westrand, president of Local 500, last year’s A Board easily averaged $87,000 last year. This year, they’ll be lucky to make $50,000.

T Board casuals last year made about $30,000 last year; this year, maybe $2,000 or $3,000. The way things are going, Westrand predicted it could be 2020 before they become full union members. As for the OO Boards, they made $15,000 to $20,000 in 2008. This year, a pitiful $51 to date.

“There’s just despair,” Westrand told Maritime Magazine. Some regulars on the C Boards, who have been coming to the dispatch hall for the last four years only worked one day last month. They can’t afford to pay rent, and have run out of employment insurance. He said one guy has been forced to live in his car as he can’t pay his rent any more.

“I’ve been down on the waterfront for 44 years and seen some of the worst recessions. The 1975 one lasted from mid-April to mid-September. But this one has already lasted longer: from January until now (September),” he added.

Crossan realizes she’s luckier than most, with money still coming in from her husband, a full union longshore worker. But even these union members aren’t getting the work they like.

“Lots of the guys are having to do jobs they haven’t done for 20 years. I feel for them,” she said.

Tom Dufresne, president of ILWU Canada, said the union took on 700 new workers about two years ago and trained them to handle the boom. Now there’s no work for them.

The union is also preparing to negotiate its contract with the BC Maritime Employers Association, with talks due to start Dec.1. The contract expires March 31. “I think it’s going to be an interesting round of negotiations,” said Dufresne.

Over on Vancouver Island, work hours are down 17 per cent this year compared with 2008. Unlike Vancouver, they don’t handle container traffic, and never really benefited from the boom.

Brett Hartley, president of ILWU Local 508, said that the downturn in the forest industry and closure of many mills has caused a steady decline in work in the last ten years. There were about 400 union members in 1999; now there are 115 union members. At the beginning of this year, there were also 60 to 70 casuals but Hartley is not sure what the numbers are now.

“They’ve been taking a beating,” said Hartley. “Some of them have been hit twice.” A lot of mill workers became longshore casuals when mills closed or took down time, and are now suffering again.

The Vancouver Island local is based in Chemainus but uses a telephone dispatch system to cover its vast area. Workers may live in Victoria and travel to work in Port Alberni three hours away, an increasingly expensive proposition.

Currently, the biggest source of work is handling raw log exports at Port Alberni, Nanaimo and Island Timberlands’ terminal, south of Nanaimo.

It’s dangerous work and some people disapprove of raw log exports, but Hartley said it was happening anyway. Logs were being towed or barged to U.S. ports and exported to China, Korea and Japan from there. The union intervened, and now at least its members are getting the work in B.C.

At Cowichan Bay, the export of Western Forest Products lumber has really slumped. Full ships carrying 21 to 24 million board feet of lumber used to sail tor the eastern U.S. every month. So far this year, only four vessels have arrived and they left half-empty.

“It’s not a pretty picture,” Hartley concluded. “The difficult part from our view is that this scenario has been going on for a number of years. It’s always been a scramble.”

© 2009 Maritime Magazine

But I wanted a more sophisticated layout. I found a new template I really liked, from Elegant Themes, so decided to switch. A five-minute switch, according to WordPress. Yeah, right.

The whole process, by now about 80 per cent complete, took me back to the early web days, when I put up and ran a nonprofit website for 18 months. Using wordpress.com I didn’t have to ftp anything, or dig around with code in the servers.

This week, I’ve had to relearn more than I ever wanted to about WebFTP, domain mapping, changing cache settings . . . and little things such as getting WP-stats to work on WordPress.org are ridiculously time-consuming.

Time for a walk on the beach in the rain.

By Alison Bate

It’s Saturday morning and my sister Gill and I are hanging out over coffee in my little cottage, listening to the rain beating overhead and enjoying being dry again.

Yesterday we spent the day up Cypress Mountain watching the women’s snowboarding live at the Olympics.

Huge buses from California took us up the local mountain; all of us ready to sit in the rain, the fog and the wind for five hours. We waited in a plastic warming hut for a couple of hours, reading the papers and chatting with a Seattle couple, before climbing up endless stairs to the giant stand.

The whole day was like sailing in winter – revelling in getting cold and wet while having a great time. By the end of the day, instead of bums on seats, there were bags on seats: all of us in the stands wearing billowing see-through plastic bags over our clothes…not exactly a fashion statement.

The Europeans were the main stars in the parallel giant slalom (our event), and in the end, a Dutch woman came first, followed by a Russian, and an Austrian. The Dutch were standing on the benches cheering madly when she won.

It was all very exciting though, especially at the end, with the knockout stages. Canada had a couple of faint hopes, but I managed to be taking a pee break when the best Canadian hope had her run (as Gill kept pointing out afterward!).

Marching down the road to the dock, Bowen Islanders prepare for the Olympic torch ceremonies the day before the big event.

It was dark and sleepy as I drove down to Snug Cove at 5:30 a.m. yesterday, but every house had its lights on.

I parked the car, offloaded my bike and pedalled across the cool damp field to Snug Cove. I passed walkers with their headlights on as I trundled across the boardwalk and left it outside the library.

“It’s like waiting for the bus,” I heard, as I stood outside the library, surrounded in the dark by hundreds of fellow islanders, many wearing red and white or the Olympic red mittens – none of which showed in the dark. It was chilly, and we were all huddled up, waiting for something to happen.

“Ooh, there it is,” and we looked up the road to see an orange wobbly flame, with a huge crowd of people walking behind it, ghosts in the dark. “Why are there two flames?” asked someone in the crowd. The flame or flames seemed to disappear from view somewhere near the General Store, and we resumed our waiting-for-the-bus positions.

Watching the torch go by on Bowen Island

“Thank You, Bowen!” said Murray Atherton, as he praised us for the magnificent turnout and urged us not to block the ferry traffic.

The Olympic entourage then took back stage as the huge crowd all turned to watch the commuter cars load endlessly onto the Queen of Cap for the 6:30 a.m. run. A very Bowen-y moment.

On the Dallas dock, standing on the rail, it was hard to see everything, but the Olympic flame was sucked back into something else and taken onto the ferry. We sang “O Canada” rather lamely and then Lorne Warr launched into his new song “Back to the Island again”.

Watched by more than a thousand people, the Queen of Capilano left the dock, prettily framing the foreground, the lights of Cypress Mountain on the North Shore in the background, and dawn started to break. That was the Kodak moment.

And then it was all over and I went and had my usual coffee and oatmeal muffin at the Snug.

In the recently-published article about my grandfather and Bint el Sudan, there wasn’t room to include all the information and memories I collected about the perfume.

Here, then, are some of the emails I received about Bint el Sudan, starting with the present, and followed by memories of those working in the U.K. company of Bush Boake Allen.

View from Khartoum

Alawiyya Jamal, a Khartoum-based humanitarian officer, told me that no Sudanese wedding perfume is complete without Bint.

She adds: “While preparing for my nephew’s wedding, I found it also comes as an atomizer for everyday use. Personally it is one of my favorite smells, not only as in the perfume mix but also a daily freshener.

“The other use is that it is sprayed on broken down sandalwood for the bride and married women. It is also used on the pieces of the acacia seyal wood with white powered musk as scent. The wood makes the perfume last longer and improves its smell.

“When used with the Acacia wood, it is used to scent the house, bed covers, and for those who can not afford the sandalwood, they use it as an alternative to perfume the tobes (the brightly-colored sari-like clothes worn by many Sudanese women), dresses and cloth.”

Not always topless

Modern Kenyan version of Bint el Sudan

He used to produce Bint in Zimbabwe and also recalls how popular it was, even in the most remote places: “Around 1993, I travelled to a very remote part of Mozambique and although there were virtually no westernized products available at that time, Bint was in the market, which consisted of a few locally fabricated tables from raw trees, mainly selling fish, millet and locally grown produce.

“The Bint had been purchased in Zimbabwe by informal traders (avoiding taxes) who carried it to the Inhassuro market in Mozambique via buses, carrying the Bint in their baggage. Inhassuro is some 1,000 kms. from the retail outlets within Zimbabwe where they would have made the original purchase.”

He notes that alcohol and non-alcohol versions are both still available.

“Whilst the oil-based perfume is aimed primarily at the Muslims, it is sold to many non-Muslims as well. It is not difficult to make perfume without alcohol, just more costly, as the dosage of actual fragrance needs to be higher than in alcohol-based perfumes. The alcohol and oil are merely carriers.”

Africa’s most successful perfume

Nicholas Evans, the IFF fragrance sales manager for Africa, wrote: “Firstly I must state that Bint el Sudan and its label are a registered trademark of International Flavors and Fragrances Inc. (IFF). The brand was acquired along with several other brands when IFF purchased Bush Boake Allen (BBA) in 2000. Unfortunately much of the knowledge of the history of the perfume was lost at the time.

“The story goes that when a new employee joined BBA, a member of staff would ask them if they knew what was the top-selling perfume by bottle in the world. The new employee would naturally answer something like Chanel No.5 or another famous brand, only to be told by the member of staff that they were incorrect, that it was in fact Bint el Sudan, belonging to BBA.

“Although the fragrance was created in 1920, today’s fragrance is essentially the same except for certain modernisations mostly due to changes in raw material availability and toxicological rules and regulations.

“This is an important factor as Africa is a unique market: once a product is established, any changes in packaging, labelling or smell will result in immediate rejection by customers. This is a result of the many fake and adulterated products entering the market, Bint el Sudan is no stranger to this. From the beginning, even till today, we are at war against fake products.

“Why? Bint el Sudan is today still the biggest selling and most successful perfume Africa has ever known.

“It is packaged and distributed in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, South Africa, Sudan, and Zimbabwe as well as in Saudi Arabia for the Middle Eastern market.

“An average of 5.7 million bottles of Bint El Sudan are produced every year for Africa, 80 per cent coming out of Nigeria from the original W.J. Bush Company in Kano, Northern Nigeria.

“It is produced in a mineral oil base, not alcohol according to Muslim law, and has been extended into other products like body lotions, hair pomades, petroleum jelly, air fresheners, talcum powders and even soap bars.

“Bint el Sudan is not just a perfume that people use in order to just smell nice. On a continent where water is the most precious resource, perfume is needed in the sometimes long periods between bathing.

“The mineral oil is an excellent carrier for the perfume, giving it longevity for the wearer as well as helping to seal the skin against moisture loss in the hot climate and to smooth and soften the skin.

“However, Bint el Sudan is greater than just that: it is the unmistakable smell of Africa – a blend of floral odours with the emphasis of jasmine, lilac and lily of the valley, with undertones of woody notes supported by musk, amber and moss.”

The wedding perfume

Robert Kramer, Associate Professor of History at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, U.S., specializes in the social history of the Sudan.

He writes: “I have a bottle of Bint El Sudan in my office that I purchased in Omdurman in 1986 or 87.

I would guess that it came to be associated with weddings because the picture depicts a girl/young woman in the Rahat, a dress traditionally worn by unmarried girls (and probably since Mahdist times in the 19th century, by brides over their other clothing). i.e. I think it was marketed as “the wedding perfume” in the 20th century, whether it bore any resemblance as a fragrance to what various Sudanese ethnicities used at weddings or not.

The jewelry worn by the girl on the label resembles what I have seen worn by brides of the northern riverain Arabs (Ja’aliyin, Danagla, Shaygiyya).”

Memories from the filling lines

Roger Duprey worked at Bush Boake Allen in England from 1965 to 1996, first as a laboratory chemist and later as a perfumer. He put me in touch with many of his former colleagues, many of them members of the British Society of Perfumers.

Phil Mernick worked as supervisor on the filling lines and in various other roles at Bush Boake Allen from 1966 and until the firm was bought out by IFF in 2000.

He recalls that the non-alcoholic and alcoholic versions were packaged separately. “The non-alcoholic Bint No.3 was oil-based and packaged in a tall, thin 12-millilitre vial with a cork, while the alcohol-based Bint No.5 had a different-style bottle.

“When the alcoholic form was imported to Saudi Arabia, a bittering agent was added so that it couldn’t be drunk, to comply with Muslim customs.”

Mernick adds: “The U.K.-filled Bint was done in Bush days by their Potter & Moore subsidiary. Later, when that was sold to De Witt, production moved to Walthamstow and finally to Long Melford.

“More than a million bottles were filled in the U.K. every year for export to countries such as Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Libya. Even larger quantities were packed in Nigeria using perfume concentrate supplied from the UK.

“There was also local manufacture at BBA sites or by BBA agents in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Togo, Sierra Leone, Cameroon, Liberia and Zaire. Not all these countries manufactured at the same time, many falling victim to the endemic instability of the region.”

Vince Skeels, a former colleague at Bush Boake Allen, wrote: “BES (Bint el Sudan) contained at one time many separate fragrance bases (could have been 48 intermediates), all of which themselves contained many ingredients.

“In terms of volume, BBA (Bush Boake Allen) London made something like 40 tons a year of perfume concentrate (i.e. without the alcohol etc.) and this was shipped to Bush Nigeria or Bush Ivory Coast.

“If you consider this was then diluted in alcohol at say 10 per cent, then total volume was something like 400 tons, which is huge for an alcoholic perfume. But be aware that maybe all of it did not end up in perfume (soaps etc were also produced).”

Peter Whipps worked at BBA Walthamstow from 1976 until 2001, when the site
closed due to the IFF takeover. He started off as Fragrance Quality Control
manager in the technical area, and later moved into the perfumery group as a
technical perfumer, becoming a perfumer a couple of years later.

He writes: “As Vince has previously mentioned, Bint was originally a very
complex perfume, but in latter years was simplified to make it easier to
manufacture in London. I can’t say exactly what it contains now as IFF has
the formula but back in 2000 it contained the following oils and extracts:

Lemon, bergamot, orange, geranium, lavandin, patchouli, petitgrain, clary
sage, clove, cedarwood & peppermint oils plus treemoss, labdanum & mimosa
extracts.”

* Related post: Bint el Sudan, my grandfather . . .and me

My grandfather E.E.Burgess, left, and another W.J. Bush agent in Africa

This story “The Bint Formula” is in the December 2009 issue of Reader’s Digest Canada magazine, now on sale.