Paper pushes jet fuel trial back months
By John Boivin Local Journalism Initiative
The work preparing volumes of evidence is pushing the start of the Lemon Creek fuel spill trial well into the new year.
Lawyers for all the involved parties gathered by conference call before Judge Robert Brown in a Nelson courtroom Tuesday morning.
The trial was also delayed back in November of this year as both crown and defence deal with the mountain of evidence.
The trial stems from criminal charges laid after an aviation fuel spill in the Slocan Valley in 2013.
The Executive Flight Centre, one of its employees, and the provincial government are all co-defendants in the case, begun after a tanker truck carrying aviation fuel up a logging road in the Slocan Valley tipped over and spilled 33,000 litres of fuel.
Crown prosecutor John Cliff told the court he’d sent out 10 binders of documents to the defence in October, but had five more to prepare.
“I have a number of materials that have to be organized, copied, and sent my learned friends,” he told the judge. He said he plans to finish sending out the materials this month.
The defence will review the evidence before submitting their plea to the judge, now likely in February.
The parties will meet again in January to further prepare for trial.
Dozens of witnesses are likely to be called in a case that includes the provincial government as a defendant in a criminal trial.
The charges include two counts of polluting under the federal Fisheries Act, and six counts under the Environmental Management Act. The fines range from $5,000 to $1 million or six months in jail.
