The following are excerpts from the excellent article by Michelle Gamage of The Tyee https://thetyee.ca/News/2023/02/20/BC-Slow-Action-Ship-Breaker-Case/ The red text are the claims Jurisich makes in spite of evidence to the contrary.

The owner of the site, Deep Water Recovery Ltd., says it has never been shown test results that say it was out of compliance under provincial environmental regulations and that it has done nothing wrong under B.C.’s laws.

The company received three warnings for improper discharge of waste, and one advisory for improperly labelling containers used to store waste oil. Raw sewage and heavy metals like copper, lead, zinc and cadmium that exceeded what’s allowable in B.C. waters were being discharged on site and ending up in the ocean.

When contacted for comment company owner Mark Jurisich said provincial regulators never actually came to his site. He alleged the province’s reports were “political” because he’d been told regulators were “under a lot of political pressure.” 

In an email the Canadian Coast Guard confirmed it was aware of the spill coming from a ship moored at Deep Water Recovery that was in the process of being pulled up on land for deconstruction. Spill pollution was “minimized” by sorbent booms deployed on site and the province was notified about the spill as “the lead agency for spills of a land-based origin,” the Coast Guard said in an email.

“There was no petrol spill here at all,” Jurisich told The Tyee. “The Coast Guard did not come here. Environment [and Climate Change] Canada, a federal agency, did come here and said ‘there’s nothing here.’”

Jurisich challenges the validity of the work done by all provincial regulators and the three warnings and one advisory they issued.

“Accusing me of something doesn’t mean anything. Show me where we are out of compliance, show me the effluent, show me your water testing,” he said. “There are no results showing that we are out of compliance.” 

He added the Natural Resource Compliance and Enforcement Database reports did not “show the science.” 

“Our attorneys say ‘at the end of the day Mark, the law is the law and you haven’t done anything wrong. If you were you would have been shut down. Particularly with the amount of pressure and exposure that you are under right now,’” he says. “That has not happened.”

In his interview with The Tyee, Jurisich declined to answer questions and told The Tyee to email him instead.

Jurisich did not respond to an email that included a question about whether Deep Water Recovery was pulling the Miller Freeman out of the water to disassemble it.