A flare tip above a British Columbia fjord town has been running a flame close to 295 feet tall, and monthly gas volumes through that stack came in 40 times over the level the permit allows

Kitimat sits at the head of a long fjord in northwest British Columbia, ringed by mountains that hold weather in like a bowl.

On the worst nights a flame stands over the valley at about 295 feet, roughly a 26 story building.

Residents watch it from their windows and post about the smell.

In April 2025, a year before any of this reached the public, the operator had told the regulator that a flare stack had an integrity problem requiring more flaring.

Some nights the plume above it turns to black smoke, which is what a flare looks like when it is not burning cleanly.

A flare is supposed to be a small safety valve. So why is this one that big?

What a crack in the tip does to the flame

The answer is at the very top of the stack, in a part most people never think about.

Gas leaves the plant, travels up the stack and burns at the rim. That rim is the flare tip, and it is the piece that shapes and holds the flame.

One of the tips at this facility cracked. A second crack opened five days later.

A damaged tip lets the flame creep down toward the steel instead of sitting cleanly above it.

The fix operators reach for is counterintuitive. They push more gas up the stack, because a faster stream carries the flame front further out and keeps it from burning back down into the pipework.

So the flame gets taller and the monthly volume gets larger, for a reason that has nothing to do with how much gas the plant needs to dispose of.

More gas through a damaged tip also burns less completely, which is where the black smoke and the unburned hydrocarbons come from.

Four stacks in a valley that does not clear

The site runs several flares, sorted by what they handle. Warm wet gas, cold dry gas, storage and loading, plus a spare.

The valley around them is the complicating factor. Mountains and cold air keep a plume sitting low instead of dispersing.

On one January day black smoke came off the site for more than seven hours outside any emergency.

The following day it ran for over two hours.

The permit allows none at all during normal operation and at most 15 minutes in any two hour window during a process upset.

The provincial regulator ordered the operator to identify the cause.

What the filed monthly reports show

The numbers come from monthly air emission reports the operator files with the B.C. Energy Regulator, obtained by Laura Minet of the Clean Air Lab at the University of Victoria through freedom of information requests.

Between October 2025 and January 2026 the warm wet flare averaged 45 times its permitted volume, the cold dry flare 40 times, and storage and loading five times.

December was the worst month in that window.

In April 2025, a year before any of this reached the public, the operator had told the regulator that a flare stack had an integrity problem requiring more flaring.

By April 2026 the spare flare was running about 18 times its limit, and permitted nitrogen oxide levels were passed twice that month.

What nobody can measure yet

Researchers using optical gas imaging recorded unburned hydrocarbon plumes leaving the stacks, and say those plumes can carry benzene and other volatile organic compounds.

The operator’s answer is that the imaging cannot quantify anything, that it shows a plume without showing what is in it or at what concentration.

That is a fair objection, and it is also the problem. Benzene is not routinely measured at these facilities, and the quarterly samples that are taken come back under the mandated limits.

Routine flaring has a number attached to it. Non routine flaring carries no numeric ceiling at all, because it is classified as a safety response.

No cumulative health assessment exists for the airshed, which leaves the same evidence gap that follows offshore projects through their own permit fights.

The filed documents are the only continuous record the public has.

What the operator has asked for next

The company has applied to the regulator for a tenfold increase in its authorized flaring volume.

Its deputy chief operating officer told a Kitimat council meeting in March that the amendment would be to maintain that level of flaring while engineers work through the design.

Replacement tips are the size of a large room and take more than a year to procure, and the repair program is expected to run into 2028.

Four municipalities sharing the region have asked federal and provincial governments for an independent health assessment, joined by more than fifty organizations.

The wider stakes are national. Canadian governments are on track to put close to $2.8 billion of public support into liquefied gas by 2030, and the permitting template used here is the one the next projects will follow.

Cleaner buildouts face nothing like this scrutiny, and a field of solar panels has no tip to crack.

A physicians group put the disclosure question plainly in its May filing, quoting a professor emeritus of occupational and environmental medicine: notifying people after a flaring event does not allow them to protect themselves.