If only the environmental crowd in Edmonton would clean up their own backyard, you might be able to swim downstream of Edmonton; but no, now we have to hear all the clamour about the oilsands again as if the left-wing eco-political crowd of urbanites were standing on safe ground.
First of all, some are expressing ‘shock and dismay’ over an assumed lack of baseline work done on the Athabasca River. Let’s hear it from someone who was there before the oilsands got really busy.
“In the late ’50s, I spent quite a bit of time in the oilsands area, and know from the little bit of data available that the ‘tar sands’ have been leaking hydrocarbon and heavy metals before any exploitation took place. I remember also well the bloody cold winter of 1957 that I spent three months supervising a core hole assessment program for the Athabasca Oil Project in which the company I worked for at the time was a partner.” So writes Albert F. Jacobs, a Calgary geologist in an email to me.
Let’s look at the Alberta Oil Sands Environmental Report summary submitted in November of 1981 to Jack Cookson, then minister of Environment for Alberta, which states: “The assessment is made that baseline information on the Athabasca Oil Sands Region is now complete enough that additional general surveys will not be required in the future.”
Alberta Oil Sands Environmental Research Program Summary Report covered the period of 1975 to 1980. The writer goes on to say “The program amassed a very large amount of base-line information over its five year life at a cost of about $17.4 million.”
The most recent Water Monitoring Data Review Committee report examines only four documents related to the oilsands. I did a quick check on the Water Survey of Canada and found 20,933 documents under “Athabasca River” and in their publication library I came up with a list of 684 peer-reviewed papers that were in some way related to the Athabasca.
Yet just earlier this month, by comparison, the urban emissions and toxic runoff disaster that is destroying the North Saskatchewan River received scant attention from the public — maybe because the public is to blame and not Big Oil!
According to an Edmonton Journal article, Farming, city life take toll on North Saskatchewan, on Feb. 11, the North Saskatchewan River downstream is virtually a dead loss in terms of water quality, mostly because similar toxins and air emissions (to those in the Kelly-Schindler study) stack up on the snow in winter and run off into the river.
Research shows that urban areas are actually worse accumulators of heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs, which are atmospheric pollutants), plus other junk, than wilderness locations, because the many paved surfaces do not allow natural filtration of rainwater by the soil.
Likewise large volumes of fuel pollution (includes PAHs) is washed off highways and swished into storm sewers, overflowing or bypassing municipal treatment much of the time. And as pointed out in the Journal article, the wetlands (which act as natural pollution filters) of Edmonton are now all gone — someone’s real estate development.
But if you take the Kelly-Schindler River Quality Challenge and apply the same snowcore pack and river runoffs tests to Edmonton and the North Saskatchewan, the city and its vocal eco-illogical crowd would be red-faced with shame compared to the results of the oilsands study.
So what’s the status of the “world-class water monitoring network” for the City of Champions and their impact on the North Saskatchewan?
There isn’t one?
You mean it is OK to kill your own city’s river while in eco-hysterics over the Athabasca? Volume and flow rate have an impact on the effect of pollution accumulation — so let’s put the rivers in perspective. The cumulative volume of the Athabasca/Peace at the delta is 107, 726,000,000 m3 compared to the 7,277,000,000 m3 of the North Saskatchewan or the 7,277,000,000 m3 of the South Saskatchewan.
As noted throughout the report by the Water Monitoring Data Review Committee, the Kelly-Schindler papers were sparse on actual river water sampling. Likewise, more important, it was noted that concentrations in the water are not as important as what is happening to the living things in the water.
According to RAMP – which has the fish and benthic data for how the living things are doing in the area, things are OK in the Athabasca River.
According to Dr. Michael Sullivan, fish and aquatic life in the North Saskatchewan are in critical condition. Living things are dead and dying — going the way of the green sludge Sturgeon River that reeks but does not flow anymore.
So where should we install that ‘world class’ water monitoring system? And who should be going through compliance requirements? The oilsands? Or Edmonton and other urban centres?
Maybe some enterprising university science students will take up this challenge.
Michelle Stirling-Anosh is a Ponoka-based freelance columnist.