The fire might not have been real, but the stakes certainly were as Kinder Morgan Canada Inc. showcased its emergency response operations for regulators during a training simulation at its Edmonton South terminal on Wednesday.

Observers from the National Energy Board were on hand to monitor the company’s response to a simulated blaze at one of the terminal’s 400,000-bbl crude oil tanks. Kinder Morgan recently completed a multi-year expansion project — the last of 16 new tanks was installed in December 2014 — and the training exercise was among the final conditions of approval.

Kinder Morgan said that it was the largest emergency drill in its history.

In addition to company staff and NEB officials, other stakeholders also participated, including the provincial government and local municipal and industrial members of the Strathcona District Mutual Aid Program. Overall, 200 people took part in the exercise, the company estimated.

At the terminal site — which also serves as kilometre zero of the Trans Mountain pipeline — staffers and local firefighting crews deployed a cannon capable of shooting 6,000 gallons of water and foam per minute to tackle the faux-fire. An incident command post was stationed at a nearby Sherwood Park hotel, while municipal representatives monitored the action through a drone hovering above the site.

“It’s an opportunity for our employees to practice and implement our programs under as realistic conditions as we can simulate, and it’s an opportunity to practice co-operation with the local agencies,” said Mike Davies, Kinder Morgan’s senior director of marine development, who oversees emergency management on the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

Darin Barter, a spokesman for the NEB, said the agency will judge the exercise based on three criteria. First, Kinder Morgan must prove its technical operations are up to the task and it possesses the equipment needed to respond to an incident of this type. Second, the company must show it will conduct the necessary public outreach to keep the community informed and safe during an emergency. Finally, it must fulfil all of the commitments it made to the NEB during the approval process.

The NEB will complete a report on the exercise within three weeks and pass along the findings to Kinder Morgan. The two organizations will then review for potential areas of improvement and discuss non-compliance actions, if any are found.

“This isn’t a pass or fail exercise. This is about learning,” Barter said. “This is about making sure that the company takes it as seriously as we do.”

Although the terminal is the starting point of the Trans Mountain pipeline, the company emphasized that the exercise was not directly planned as a response to opposition to its $5.4-billion plan to expand the line.

Earlier in May, the fire department of Burnaby, B.C. — the site of a planned tank farm expansion serving the pipeline project — released a report arguing that the site should not be expanded because of potential emergency and fire hazards.

“We do one or two of these large exercises every year, so the fact that we’re doing the exercise is not anomalous. It’s something we do regularly. This particular scenario, though, is to fulfil the requirement of the NEB,” Davies said.

Kinder Morgan plans to conduct a similar large-scale emergency exercise at its Westridge marine terminal in Port Metro Vancouver later this year. The NEB will be looking closely at the results from both exercises as it considers the company’s emergency response planning capabilities during deliberations on the Trans Mountain project.

“Those two exercises put together will give us a very good understanding of how the company is capable of responding to a major incident,” Barter said.