Heather Wright/The Independent

A Wallaceburg environmental group says the spill of crude oil into the St. Clair River in Sarnia highlights the need for an emergency communications system down river.

Just after 1:30 Thursday, Suncor officials notified the Sarnia/Lambton community and the Ministry of the Environment, Parks and Conservation about a spill into the river. Emergency crews from Suncor and Shelplaced booms in the water at the Suncor and Shell docks to contain the estimated 5,000 litres of crude oil from Suncors’ cooling system. Saturday, spills action crews from both Suncor and Shell were still working along the river with vacuum trucks on hand to clean up whatever oil could be found.

Thursday, shortly after the spill, St. Clair Township officials alerted the community about the crude oil leak through Sarnia/Lambton Alerts. The system sends out emails and telephone calls about emergency situations including any pollution into the river.

Joel Johnson of WATCH – the Wallaceburg Area Team for a Cleaner Habitat – says Suncor notified the group directly about the spill. The company also called the Wallaceburg Filtration plant to inform workers about the crude in the river. It did not reach Wallaceburg and Johnson said, if it had, the water intake would have been closed and water would have been drawn from the elevated water tower there.

While WATCH was notified by the company, others, Johnson says, were not.

“WATCH received phone calls and texts from area residents who had not received notification about the spill or did not know where to find more information,” said Johnson in a news release.

“We can only assume that the municipality was inundated with calls.”

Johnson says that while there are a number of notification systems for St. Clair and Aamjiwnaang residents, there is no such system in the Wallaceburg area.

“We are concerned that there is a large group of community members who do not fall into these two groups. As a result, we asked the Chatham-Kent Water Filtration department about their system for a communication plan to the potentially impacted general public. Up to this date we have not received a response,” Johnson said adding WATCH would be glad to work with the municipality to “close this apparent gap in their communication plan to the general public.

“Dependence on a volunteer organization such as WATCH maybe beneficial but not sustainable.”