About 250 people showed up in a North Burnaby park on Saturday to protest expanding oil infrastructure connected to Alberta's tar sands.

"I do think it went well," said Ben West of the Wilderness Committee, one of the main groups behind the protest. "Generally speaking, the support locally was quite high."

The protest was timed to coincide with a larger, twoweek demonstration in Washington D.C., where environmentalists rallied against Keystone XL, a proposed pipeline that would route oil from the tar sands to Texas.

West has concerns about climate change and a number of oil-related issues, including tanker traffic in the Burrard Inlet, the proposed Enbridge pipeline and Kinder Morgan's plan to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline, which runs oil from Alberta to Burnaby.

"We are fighting another proposed expansion of the tar sands infrastructure here in B.C., as both Kinder Morgan and Enbridge try to bring new or expanded pipelines and oil tanker traffic to the Pacific coast," West said.

Kinder Morgan's 1,150-kilometre Trans Mountain pipeline runs from Edmonton to Burnaby and is twinned in some areas. To increase shipping capacity and meet rising demand, the company would have to twin more sections of the existing line. The Trans Mountain pipeline's maximum capacity is now at 300,000 barrels a day, but the most it could handle if fully expanded is up to 700,000 barrels. No expansion plans have been approved yet, according to Kinder Morgan spokesperson Lexa Hobenshield.

The protesters gathered in a North Burnaby park at Hastings and Cliff Avenue, before heading to the nearby Kinder Morgan terminal and the site of the pipeline rupture on Inlet Drive.

In July 2007, a city-hired contractor broke Kinder Morgan's pipeline while digging along the residential street. A 20-metre geyser of oil sprayed for 25 minutes, coating nearby homes in crude oil, and residents were evacuated.