Kelly Brown was awoken at 4:30 a.m. on October 13, 2016, by the kind of phone call nobody ever wants to receive : an environmental catastrophe was unfolding a 20-minute boat ride up the coast from his home in the community of Bella Bella.
“I had to call this guy back because I wanted to make sure — because I’m half asleep — wanted to make sure that I heard him right, that there’s a tug that ran aground in our territory,” he recalls.
Brown is the director of the Heiltsuk Integrated Resource Management department, the branch of the Heiltsuk (Read more…) in charge of the environmental stewardship of the First Nation’s traditional territory.
Two hours later he was on site with a team ready to respond.
“It was total chaos,” says hereditary chief Harvey Humchitt.