B.C. Greenpeace activists put the lurid details of a recent trip to the Gulf of Mexico on display in Vancouver yesterday.

"There were sunbathers with tar-balls stuck to the backs of their legs," recalled Greenpeace volunteer Laura Yates.

Yates and B.C. Greenpeace director Stephanie Goodwin returned to Vancouver on July 11 from a nine-day tour of the oil-ravaged Gulf of Mexico. They gave a public presentation on their experience last night at the Britannia Community Centre.

Goodwin described the coastal society between Grand Isle, Louisiana and Pensacola, Florida as being in a state "long-term crisis management."

She handed out baggies containing samples of sticky oil globs for the crowd to see. Recovered from beaches during their visit, the globs were created when an unprecedented six million-plus litres of chemical dispersant was sprayed by BP over the past three months, according to Goodwin.

One audience member compared the globs to the sandy bitumen of Alberta's tar sands.

Goodwin said that oil tankers traversing B.C. coastal waters pose a comparable spill risk to Canada's shoreline.

Two hundred tankers per year will pass through the Great Bear Rainforest around Kitimat if a tar sands-to-west coast Enbridge pipeline is built, Goodwin went on to say. Each supertanker has the capacity for 318 million litres of oil, half of what has spilled into the Gulf.

The Gulf disaster occurred 80 kilometres off the coast of Louisiana, but a tanker spill off the B.C. coast could be much closer, which would mean less reaction time, Goodwin said. Opposition to the Enbridge pipeline is mounting. The Wet'suwet'en First Nation near Smithers is building a hereditary chief's house in the pipe line path, or right of way.

Actions are being planned by Greenpeace, No Tankers, and other NGOs.

Two moratoriums -- one on offshore drilling upheld by the B.C. government, and the other a federal ban on tanker traffic along the Northwest coast, need to be enforced by law, Goodwin argued. "A moratorium is a gentleman's handshake."

In classic Greenpeace fashion, the activists made sure to advertise their message while on their tour of the Gulf.

On a polluted Florida beach they erected a white banner reading "Enbridge: Picture This."

Josh Massey is completing his practicum at The Tyee