David Schindler, a University of Alberta biologist and water ecologist, says he was "rather horrified" to learn that the oil industry withdraws nearly 8 percent of the water in the Athabasca during low- to medium-flow periods. This puts industry on a collision course with climate change, he says. Since 1945 temperatures in the region have climbed by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and that increase will soon double. Schindler calculates that global heating has reduced the volume of water running into the basin by 50 percent in the last three decades.
He predicts that projected tar-sands development won't leave enough water in the Athabasca to protect its fish or the waterfowl dependent on the Athabasca Delta. Navigation on the river could come to a standstill too. He charges that neither the Canadian federal government nor Alberta's provincial authorities have collected adequate data on the river. Yet an industry stakeholder group, the Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program, recently reported that "changes in the condition of the Athabasca River up to and including 2005 have been minor."
Semple motored his Whiskey Jack up to the Suncor Mine, the facility closest to Fort McMurray. As he approached the mine site, a dusty, Mordor-like landscape replaced tamarack and spruce. Semple killed the motor and pointed to a high, odd-looking piece of land on the west bank. "This was an island once in the middle of the river," he explained. In the late 1960s, Suncor, a Calgary-based firm originally established by the visionary Pennsylvania capitalist J. Howard Pew, actually rechanneled the river and turned Tar Island into a toxic waste site.
Fred MacDonald, a 72-year-old descendant of Scottish and Cree fur traders, used to hunt duck and moose on Tar Island as a kid. He now lives in a bungalow overlooking the Athabasca River in Fort McKay, an Indian community pretty much surrounded by open-pit mines. Sitting in his kitchen drinking a glass of rat-root juice, an old aboriginal remedy made from a plant favored by muskrats ("It's good for everything"), MacDonald told me how he loved that island. He recalled the days when Syrian fur traders on the Athabasca exchanged pots and pans for muskrat and beaver pelts. Back in the 1920s and 1930s aboriginal families lived all along the river and frequently enjoyed feasts of rabbit and moose meat. They netted jack fish and pickerel all winter long. "Everyone walked or paddled and the people were healthy." Now, he said, very few people bother to travel the river much. "There is nothing in the river. It is polluted. You could dip your cup and have a nice cold drink from that river, and now you can't."
MacDonald, like many aboriginal elders, fears the tar sands are draining the surrounding forest of its life-sustaining fens and bogs. "It's our future source of water and it's drying." And he, like Schindler, can see the impact of climate change every season. Rising winter temperatures, he said, have transformed the once clear ice of the Athabasca into slush.
MacDonald doesn't have much faith that industry or government will reclaim the toxic ponds that surround his home. About 90 percent of the water withdrawn from the Athabasca River for mining ends up behind massive tailings dams or dykes. Covering an area of 30 square miles, nearly a dozen man-made impoundments line both sides of the Athabasca; the largest of them covers more than 7,400 acres.
All these ponds contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), naphthenic acids, heavy metals, salts, and bitumen. Scientists have identified more than 500 PAHs, by-products of crude-oil processing, but not much is known about them. Of 25 PAHs studied by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 14 are "probable" human carcinogens as well as potent fish-killers. Whenever migratory fowl land on one of these ponds, they promptly drown in oil. (Mining companies routinely use propane-powered cannons to scare the birds off.)
Incredibly, making one barrel of oil in the sands generates two barrels of toxic waste. Every day Syncrude dumps 250,000 tons of toxic guck into the pond behind the Syncrude Tailings Dam, which is now the world's largest dam in volume. (Only when China completes the Three Gorges Dam next year will Syncrude lose its record.) The pond is 13 miles long and holds 706 million cubic yards of water, pollutants, and sand. Jim Byrne, a water expert at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, figures that if all the toxic ponds at Syncrude and other mines were drained into Lake Erie, they would create a stinking pool nearly 10 inches deep. By 2030, the waste would sit three feet deep.
As for Suncor, John Semple can't figure out why the Canadian government ever allowed the company to create a pool of toxic waste so close to a river that feeds Canada's largest watershed (the Mackenzie River), sustains 300,000 aboriginal people, and eventually drains into the Arctic Ocean. "There's gotta be stuff leaking into the river," he said.
He's right. Suncor's Tar Island Dyke, the first tar-sands dam built in Fort McMurray, has been a leaky faucet for 40 years. At first engineers thought the dyke would have a life span of three years and be no more than 40 feet high. But they miscalculated: Today the dam towers 300 feet above the river and stretches nearly two and a half miles. It has experienced lots of problems, including "deformation creep" -- movement in the dam's foundations. To stop the slippage, Suncor recently installed a small berm at the toe of the dyke, which appears to have helped.
According to Norbert Morgenstern, an engineer and expert on tailings dams at the University of Alberta, the Tar Island Dyke drained toxic waste into the river for years. Now, as Semple surmised, the waste just seeps into the river. In a 2001 paper on tailings ponds, Morgenstern concluded that many failed, that their reliability is "among the lowest of earth structures," and that "well-intentioned corporations employing apparently well-qualified consultants is not adequate insurance against serious accidents."
