Celina Harpe is a Cree elder in Fort McKay, an aboriginal community of 450 people downstream from the Suncor plant and an hour’s drive north of Fort McMurray. She blames oilsands activity for lowering the level of the river and making the water undrinkable.
“When I was a child, we used to run down the hill and fill a pail of water. We can’t drink that water anymore,” she says. “We weren’t wealthy when I grew up, but we lived off the land.” The oilsands activity has killed fish in the river and made animals sick, she says, as well as ripped up pieces of the boreal forest.
Matthew Lepine lives in Fort Chipewyan, a town of 1,000 on Lake Athabasca, where the river empties into the lake. “The vegetation has changed in the last 30 years, and we’ve lost most of the migratory birds,” he says. Moose have become scarce and bears have disappeared from the area. Unable to survive by hunting, residents of Chipewyan have little choice but to work for the oil companies.
“We’re pretty thin on options,” Lepine says. “It’s nice country up there and we’re destroying it. It’s beautiful, yet you can’t drink the water. I never thought I’d see the day when I had to pay for water.”
Harpe and Lepine aren’t alone. Residents of communities along the Athabasca River in northern Alberta, as well as scientists and ecologists, say that the spike in oilsands activity is lowering the level of the river, killing fish and other animals and causing health problems for the people living in the area. The oil companies, however, say that they are being environmentally responsible and working to minimize the damage.
LOSING WATER
Just outside of Fort McMurray, the only city in the area, oilsands projects are visible on either side of the Athabasca. A hill is completely stripped of trees as machinery tears up the dirt. The scent of tar hangs in the air.
“You smell that? If you worked out here, that’s what your clothes would smell like all the time,” says Willis Flett as he steers his car along the highway north of the city. The charismatic 28-year-old left his hometown of Fort Chipewyan 10 years ago to work in the oilsands. Subsequently, he lived in Calgary and Edmonton, waiting tables and working in hotels, before returning to the north. “There are thousands of people working out here all day and night. There’s more people working the night shift here than in my entire hometown.”
Buried under the forest floor are deposits of oil mixed with clay, sand and water, which cover an area the size of New Brunswick. The deposits contain 175 billion barrels of oil, making this the second-largest reserve of oil in the world after Saudi Arabia. To get at it, oil companies cut down trees, remove soil and peat, and dig deep pit mines. “It’s like the surface of Mars, with these huge craters,” says Flett. “It’s sick to see how they’re destroying the forest. We’re never gonna get back what we had.”
Further down the road is a collection of identical apartment blocks, sitting row on row near the headquarters of Syncrude Canada Ltd., the company that runs the largest oilsands operation. The plants in the area are like small cities, Flett says. “Some of them have a bar in there and a hotel. One of them costs $150 a night. Companies pay that to have their workers there, but they don’t have the money to pay for the environment,” he says. “When I worked up here, all people did was work to drink. There’s nothing to do.”
He pulls the car over to the side of the road near a tailings pond, a man-made lake where toxic water that’s been used in oil production is dumped. The hope is that these lakes will allow the solids to separate from the water so it can be used in future oilsands operations. Black goo the consistency of chewing gum floats along the edges of the lake. From the air, dozens of tailings ponds are visible on a landscape where pit mines stretch as far as the eye can see. Piles of black dirt the size of hills wait for dump-trucks to haul them away for processing.
The Suncor and Syncrude plants look like the futuristic cities of science fiction, with metal buildings and concrete smokestacks lit by orange lights. Next to Syncrude’s buildings sit four-storey yellow pyramids made of sulphur, which the companies remove from the oil during the refining process. A belt of green forest remains along the edges of the river, before giving way to miles of strip-mining.
The river is the primary water source for the oilsands, which can pump as much as 453 million cubic metres out of the river, more than twice the amount of water consumed by the city of Calgary every year, and roughly 20 times the amount of water pulled out of the Athabasca for homes and businesses.
“In the oilsands, only a small proportion of water is returned to the river,” says Dan Woynillowicz, a policy analyst at the Calgary-based Pembina Institute, a public policy think-tank. Over time, the toxic water in tailings ponds might leak into the groundwater and contaminate the river, he says, and the industry can pull water out of the river even when levels are low.
A 2007 report by water experts David Schindler and John P. Thompson notes that the water level of the Athabasca has receded in the past 25 years and that it will soon fall below provincial government guidelines for safe levels in the river. In their report, the scientists note that fish could easily die off in the river because they depend on high water levels to reach the pools in which they spawn. What’s more, they say that if controls aren’t placed on water soon, there won’t be enough water to feed the oilsands operations in the future.
Darcie Park, a spokesperson for Suncor, says the company is aware of the problems facing the river and wants to protect the water level. “Certainly over the last few years, we’ve seen a lot more pressures on the river,” she says. “We have been doing a lot of work to try and increase the efficiency of our operations.” For instance, the company reduced its water use by 25 per cent between 2001 and 2006 and monitors the water it discharges into the river to ensure that it meets the province’s water quality regulations. She says Suncor wants to keep consulting with the people who live downstream from its operations to make sure their concerns over dead fish are listened to.
“Those are concerns that we really take seriously,” says Park. “We’re confident that we’re operating in an environmentally responsible way.”
OILSANDS DISEASES
The lineup at the Tim Hortons in downtown Fort McMurray stretches down the street for a block. The rush hour streets are jammed with trucks heading to and from the oilsands, while the bars are packed on Friday nights. At the hospital in town, physicians try to keep pace with the city’s boom, but it’s not easy.
“We’re floundering. We’re trying to feed the masses with five loaves and two fish,” says John O’Connor, a G.P. who’s worked in the area for 13 years. “We’re way behind. The infrastructure has remained relatively static compared to the population growth. We’re in a desperate situation.”
There are too few doctors for the region and a shortage of beds. What’s more, says O’Connor, at least one community that he visits has been experiencing an unusually high rate of illness, and he wants to know if the oilsands are causing it.
“In Fort Chipewyan, there were clusters of disease that I wasn’t seeing in Fort McMurray. Cancer, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis,” he says. “It didn’t add up, it didn’t make sense. I’m asking the question ‘why am I seeing it?’” He’s also heard from residents of Fort McKay that there are increased rates of disease in their community, and a Health Canada study in Fort McMurray found an unusually high rate of a rare bile-duct cancer.
Since he first raised the alarm about the high rates of disease in Fort Chipewyan, Health Canada has directed the Alberta College of Physicians to investigate his work, saying that he hasn’t provided enough evidence to back up his claims. “I would like to believe they’re just doing their job,” he says. “I’m meeting with the College in the middle of the month to present my documentation.”
O’Connor is leaving Fort McMurray this month to return to his native Nova Scotia. He will return to do checkups for the residents of Fort Chipewyan and won’t give up investigating what he found there. “I’m just a family physician and I’m concerned about the community,” he says. “I’m going to remain on top of the Fort Chip issue. It’s become a passion of mine to get to the bottom of this.”
DISAPPEARING TRADITIONS
From the riverbank in Fort McKay, you can see the plume of smoke from the Suncor plant rising over the hills upstream. The small band of Cree that live here once depended on the fur trade to survive, exchanging pelts with the Hudson’s Bay Company. As fur fell out of fashion and oilsands operations cut down the surrounding forest, the band’s traditional lifestyle began to disappear.
“We used to live off the land; trapping was an important part of our economy,” says Chief Jim Boucher, who has spent 21 years guiding Fort McKay through its ups and downs. “We had to find another economic opportunity.” Boucher and his band have started working with the oil companies, providing labour for them and planning their own oilsands operation on their land. While he admits that oilsands extraction has an effect on the quality of the water and air, he justifies pulling water out of the river by pointing out that the level of the river has been dropping for millennia.
“You see these effects for thousands of years. So what’s the state of the river supposed to be?” he asks rhetorically. “Certain people in the community embrace resource development because of the economic opportunities; some people are concerned about the environmental effects. If there was no resource extraction, there would be no economic opportunities.”
The wealth brought by the oil companies is evident in Fort McKay, where Boucher stands in a new band office with a vaulted ceiling and a view of the river. Down the street are several new houses resembling those in Calgary’s suburbs. Boucher believes his people can continue living a traditional lifestyle in conjunction with the development of the oilsands. Others aren’t convinced.
“We don’t eat fish from Athabasca River anymore. You see fish floating with sores on their bodies. They’re sick,” says Harpe, who still remembers how the band used to live before the development. “Our people have cancer and asthma. It was never like that when I was young.” The oil companies haven’t paid attention to the community’s needs, she says, and it took action from her before they agreed to bring water into the community.
“We were spending $2 for one little bottle of water in the store,” says Harpe. At one meeting with the oil companies, she brought a cup of water from the river. “It was just brown. I offered them to drink it and they said no. They tell us very little stuff is going up in the air, but we know different. We’re no fools. We’re scientists in our own way — we know what’s good and we know what’s not.”
Melody Lepine, who grew up downstream in Fort Chipewyan, says that low river flows have killed off fish. What’s more, social problems have plagued her community and Fort McMurray. “There are high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction,” she says. “Industry and government say ‘you can access all these economic opportunities,’ but how can you access these opportunities without education and training? The development’s just not worth it.”
George Poitrou, a councillor with the Mikisew Cree in Fort Chipewyan, disagrees with Boucher’s plan to build a new oilsands operation in the area. “I think it would be very contrary to the dire situation we’re talking about today to even consider becoming a developer,” he says. If the plan goes ahead, Mikisew would oppose it. The solution, Poitrou says, is to put a moratorium on oilsands development until the implications are better understood.
The Pembina Institute’s Woynillowicz says that there has been too little research to gauge the full impact that the oilsands are having on the river and the quality of its water. He thinks that the government should stop new oilsands development until the effects are known. “At what point do we focus on getting answers to these questions instead of approving more and more oilsands projects?” he asks.
While the oilsands are bringing money and work to a previously isolated wilderness, they’ve also brought environmental concerns, fear of disease, and worries that traditional First Nations lifestyles might be lost forever. As the sun sets over the forest, a steady stream of trucks head out from Fort McMurray to bring the night crew to the oilsands. Clouds hang low over the countryside, ready to drizzle rain into the Athabasca.
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