Mildred Lake, Athabasca Tar Sands
The Alberta Tar Sands mining operation in Alberta, Canada is the single largest engineering project on the planet, and the largest single source of pollution known to man. In one fell swoop, thanks to the Canadian government's unwavering support of the project, it has cost the one-time environmental leaders of the world the moral high-ground; becoming instead the polluting demons of the world. Not even able to pretend to remain dedicated to the environment, Canada’s involvement in the Tar Sands resulted in the total pull out of the Kyoto agreement at the end of 2011.
With toxic tailings ponds so large they can be seen from space, covering an area roughly the size of Greece, the wildlife in one of the worlds largest and most pristine wilderness is now under threat, along with the lives and livelihoods of the aboriginal First Nations people who live in the region.The terrors and travesties of the Alberta Tar Sands are almost too numerous to list, as one would expect with a project as large and inherently dirty as this. Many of the figures and claims made by the anti-Tar Sands movement are contested by big oil and the scientists they commission to conduct the studies into the impact their destructive project has on the surrounding environment. However, one thing even companies like Shell and Syncrude have had to agree on is that the tailings ponds are not good for local wildfowl, who have a nasty habit of landing in them. The oil companies acknowledge that many hundreds of birds (the Athabasca river valley is one of the largest and most trafficked bird migration routes in the northern hemisphere) could die as a result of landing on the giant open air toxic oil sludge ponds. And in fact, many already have, but in typical corporate damage limitation style, just how many is greatly disputed.
With toxic tailings ponds so large they can be seen from space, covering an area roughly the size of Greece, the wildlife in one of the worlds largest and most pristine wilderness is now under threat, along with the lives and livelihoods of the aboriginal First Nations people who live in the region.The terrors and travesties of the Alberta Tar Sands are almost too numerous to list, as one would expect with a project as large and inherently dirty as this. Many of the figures and claims made by the anti-Tar Sands movement are contested by big oil and the scientists they commission to conduct the studies into the impact their destructive project has on the surrounding environment. However, one thing even companies like Shell and Syncrude have had to agree on is that the tailings ponds are not good for local wildfowl, who have a nasty habit of landing in them. The oil companies acknowledge that many hundreds of birds (the Athabasca river valley is one of the largest and most trafficked bird migration routes in the northern hemisphere) could die as a result of landing on the giant open air toxic oil sludge ponds. And in fact, many already have, but in typical corporate damage limitation style, just how many is greatly disputed.
The consequences come home to roost
In the early spring of 2008, on a single tailing pond in a place called Aurora North, some 1,600 migrating birds (mostly ducks) landed and immediately sank to their deaths, covered in a toxic cocktail of crude bitumen, heavy metals, arsenic, and other poisons. The birds mistake the manmade tar pits for a seemingly open natural body of water, and have continued to do so. In the early spring, nearly all natural bodies of water would be covered under a thick layer of ice and snow before the changing season had a chance to melt it off. But the tailing ponds, being full of chemicals with higher freezing temps than water and heated waste products from the steam processing of the bitumen, remain unfrozen throughout the year.
A report commissioned by the self-regulated oil companies outlined the unfortunate event as an anomaly, citing a mean average of only 65 annual bird deaths based on nothing more than a spring-time body count. Based on this information Syncrude, and many of the other oil extraction companies in the area took the minimal step of installing sonic bird deterrents around the tailings ponds. These devices, essentially intermittent loud cannon fire, have limited effectiveness.
Meanwhile, a second report by Treeline Ecological Research and the Department of Biology at Dalhousie University, published in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology in 2010 refuted the numbers in the Syncrude claim, and revised the annual figures based on previous migratory audits, accounting for the number of bodies that simply sank and could not be counted, lightly oiled birds that survived their initial encounter but would die later on, counts of bird deaths throughout the year – not just spring, and other factors. The Treeline/Dalhousie report put the annual figure up from 65 dead birds to 5,600. The knock on cumulative result of this level of devastation on future generations of birds has been estimated by the Boreal Birdsong Initiative at 166 million lost birds in as little as the next 30 years.
A report commissioned by the self-regulated oil companies outlined the unfortunate event as an anomaly, citing a mean average of only 65 annual bird deaths based on nothing more than a spring-time body count. Based on this information Syncrude, and many of the other oil extraction companies in the area took the minimal step of installing sonic bird deterrents around the tailings ponds. These devices, essentially intermittent loud cannon fire, have limited effectiveness.
Meanwhile, a second report by Treeline Ecological Research and the Department of Biology at Dalhousie University, published in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology in 2010 refuted the numbers in the Syncrude claim, and revised the annual figures based on previous migratory audits, accounting for the number of bodies that simply sank and could not be counted, lightly oiled birds that survived their initial encounter but would die later on, counts of bird deaths throughout the year – not just spring, and other factors. The Treeline/Dalhousie report put the annual figure up from 65 dead birds to 5,600. The knock on cumulative result of this level of devastation on future generations of birds has been estimated by the Boreal Birdsong Initiative at 166 million lost birds in as little as the next 30 years.
We Stand on Guard for Thee - Mildred Lake, Athabasca
© Sharon Andrew - 2012
My piece, “We Stand on Guard for Thee – Mildred Lake, Athabasca” is a pointed reminder of the terrible event when, without so much as a contamination event being recorded, 1,600+ birds died in a single day. No tanker ran aground, no pipeline burst, no deep water rig exploded, no oil well was set alight by a mad despot in a foreign land. Simply the normal, everyday act of extracting and processing this worst of fossil fuels sources took place, and as a result an irreplaceable part of the thing we call "Nature" was sucked into the black hole of mud, tar and bitumen.
The Mildred Lake Settling Basin (Tailings Pond) is 5.5km long and 2.5km wide. It is the second largest dam in the world, holding 350,000,000 cubic meters of tailings waste. It is one of 25 such similar tailings ponds, covering a nearly 200km square area of what was once pristine boreal forest. 4,000,000,000 (billion) litres of heavy metal and tar enriched waste leak from these unlined sand tailings ponds into the surrounding water tables, rivers and land each year.
The Mildred Lake Settling Basin (Tailings Pond) is 5.5km long and 2.5km wide. It is the second largest dam in the world, holding 350,000,000 cubic meters of tailings waste. It is one of 25 such similar tailings ponds, covering a nearly 200km square area of what was once pristine boreal forest. 4,000,000,000 (billion) litres of heavy metal and tar enriched waste leak from these unlined sand tailings ponds into the surrounding water tables, rivers and land each year.
