Tar sands reaping reward and havok in Alberta
Mother Jones has a must read article on the wide array of consequences attributed to extracting oil from tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Everything from prostitution and drug use to rare forms of cancer and deformed fish — the place once renowned for its subtle beauty is turning into an industrial wasteland.
The article starts by detailing the story of a small town just downstream from the sands, where the health effects of tar sand mining is very clear. Pathogens and carcenagens have infiltrated the water supply upstream and have slowly contaminated the local ecology.
In the past few years, a tide of serious illnesses has passed through Fort Chip’s tiny health clinic. In a period of a few months, [Dr.] O’Connor treated half a dozen people with thyroid disorders. He’s diagnosed multiple cases of lung, colon, bladder, and prostate cancer—many more than he’d seen in other First Nations communities in Alberta. In 2003 he determined that a man with jaundiced skin and weight loss was suffering from cholangiocarcinoma, a rare and virulent bile-duct cancer that normally afflicts 1 person in every 100,000…In late 2004, O’Connor diagnosed a second case of cholangiocarcinoma in a 60-year-old school bus driver who died a few weeks later…
The anecdotal evidence that something was wrong was mounting: Fort Chipewyan’s hunters complained that their duck and muskrat tasted watery and bland, that moose livers were enlarged and spotted white, and that when they boiled river water it left a viscous brown scum on the pot. “It’s got so bloody many chemicals coming down in that water system today,” says Ladouceur, who’s stopped drinking straight from the river as he’d done since childhood. Many Fort Chip residents have even forsaken the town’s purified tap water, struggling to afford the bottled kind, which sells for $8 a gallon. The clinic often treats the elderly for dehydration.
The ecological effects are one thing — tar sand extraction requires the land to be ’scraped’ — but the most devastating consequences are found in the people. However, it’s not just the chemicals that are causing problems, it’s also the money.
The effort to wane America off of its dependence on oil from the Middle East coupled with dwindling global oil supplies has the Alberta tar sands picking up the slack. Nearly every major American oil cooperation has added claims there in recent years. This influx of jobs and money into this small region has created a community reminiscent of San Francisco during the Gold Rush:
The influx of fortune seekers and roughnecks has transformed Fort McMurray into a place that longtime residents barely recognize. Gone are the days when one might see caribou from the back yard. The town has doubled in size over the past decade to more than 64,000 people. With a median single-family home price of $550,000, it’s now among the highest-priced towns in Canada. (The average two-story home price in Toronto is $485,000.) It sports a full-service casino, restaurants with names like Fuel, an Oil Sands Discovery Centre for tourists, and a new nickname: McMoney. Inexperienced truck drivers can earn $100,000 a year in the tar sands, welders twice that. On the only road leading into town, known as the “Highway of Death,” oversize rigs are passed on blind curves by workers flush with cash and booze…
On “Thirsty Thursday,” mine workers cashed their paychecks at a strip club and hit the Oil Can or Diggers for beers. Friends introduced Chipsy to cocaine, the camp’s drug of choice because it’s difficult to detect in random drug tests. She guesses that three-quarters of tar sands workers use it regularly. (Fort McMurray’s rate of cocaine-related incidents is three times Toronto’s.) People lost their jobs, she says, but “then you just get a job with another mine…”
Those who stay in Fort McMurray often don’t fare as well. Prostitution is rampant. The number of pages in the phone book devoted to escort services has reportedly gone from 1 to 10 in recent years. After I say goodbye to Georgette Adam, I pass a portly man and a woman having sex on a picnic table in front of the mayor’s office. The town’s homelessness rate, driven by the exorbitant housing costs, is the worst in Alberta. In the last three winters, 12 people froze to death on the streets.
Obviously the oil companies don’t want to tear up huge swaths of land in Canada — it’s insanely expensive to extract oil from tar sands. So because of the lack of supplies elsewhere, they are being forced to. The cost, as you can tell, has so far been near devastating and looks to get far, far worse:
Canada is now the United States’ top oil supplier, selling us more than the Saudis. Not since Texas wildcatters hit black gold 80 years ago has North America seen such a frantic rush for oil. Over the next five years, investment in the Alberta tar sands is expected to exceed $75 billion; oil production is set to increase by 160 percent by 2015. Alberta’s 59 tar sands sites now form the single largest industrial zone in the world. If it is fully developed, the result could be up to 54,000 square miles of man-made wasteland.
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