Andrew Blackwell - Visit Sunny Chernobyl - And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

Downtown sits on the triangle of land where the Athabasca and Clear water Rivers converge and run north. But Fort McMurray is growing. Just across the Athabasca, a loop of fresh suburbs three times the size of downtown sprawls up the hill. In the eight years preceding the global economic slowdown of 2008, the city’s population nearly doubled, to about a hundred thousand people. Housing is therefore exceedingly tight in Fort McMurray, and prices are closer to what you might expect in Toronto than in some town a five-hour drive from anywhere. Places to live are in such short supply, and the population drawn by oil sands work so transient, that some twenty-five thousand people—nearly a quarter of all residents—live in work camps provided by the oil sands companies. Which is to say, they don’t really live here at all.

I arrived on a broad summer day, the sky smooth and bright and warm. I was staying with Don and Amy, an affable couple I had contacted through friends. Along with a teenage son, they lived in a two-story house in one of the recently built suburbs. Don was tall and thoughtful and wore socks with his shorts. Amy was small, dark-haired, and sprightly in a way that made her seem much younger than she was. They were in the full flower of middle age, spending their free time hiking and bicycling when the seasons allowed it. Hospitality seemed to come to them as a natural side effect of owning a house, and although they had no idea who I was or why I was there, they gave me my own bedroom upstairs and let me have the run of their fridge.

They both worked for oil sands companies: Amy for Suncor, Don for Syncrude. These are Canada’s two primary oil sands companies, and each reliably pulls in billions of dollars in annual profits. Amy did leadership training, while Don was an engineer.

What, they wondered, was I doing in Fort McMurray?

I didn’t want to say I had come to their town to see how the very two companies they worked for were ruining the world. It’s this phobia I have about not seeming like a total asshole. So I gave them the long, squirmy version, something about environment and industry and seeing for myself and—

“Well,” said Amy brightly. “We both work for the dark side.”

The dark side?

Don scratched his head. “I don’t know if you heard about our duck episode.”

The rivers and forests that cradle Fort McMurray offer plenty of invigorating outdoor activities to visitors looking for that sort of thing. By the looks of it, you could do some great hiking or buzz the river on a Jet Ski, and I’m sure there’s moose around that you could shoot. But the pollution tourist goes to Fort McMurray only for the mines.

It was a homecoming of sorts. I was born in Alberta (in Calgary), and although I left before I was two years old, it had always lingered in my imagination as that magical place— the place I’m from. This was my first time back in the province, and I intended to celebrate by seeing some torn-up planet.

I will admit to a certain excitement about it all, even though the responsible attitude, as a sensitive, eco-friendly liberal, would have been one of grave concern, or even horror. But I’m also the son and grandson of engineers: intelligent, bullshit-allergic men out of Alaska and South Dakota, men who lived by their knowledge of roads and of pipelines, and of rocks, and of how things get done. And though I inherited barely a trace of their common sense, I honor them how I can. How else to explain my almost sentimental enthusiasm for heavy infrastructure and industrial machines?

You could say, then, that I came to Fort McMurray with conflicted feelings about the oil sands, unsure of just how much filial gusto and faux-local pride were appropriate at the scene of a so-called climate crime. But this could be said about Canada in general. I was merely a walking example of the country’s love-hate relationship with its own resources. The modest northern country where Greenpeace was founded had been declared an “emerging energy superpower” by its own prime minister, and in a spasm of vehement ambivalence, Canada was both pioneering the era of dirty oil and leading the fight to stop it.

Suncor’s and Syncrude’s main operations are located a quick jaunt up Highway 63, which runs parallel to the Athabasca, past hummocks of evergreen. About twenty-five miles out of town, the air starts smelling like tar. Suncor’s business is hidden from the road, but Syncrude shows a little leg. As you get close, the trees disappear, and you pass a long sandy berm; one of Syncrude’s flagship tailings ponds sits on the other side, a shallow lake of glassy wastewater.

I rolled down the window to let in the breeze, tarry and warm. The cracking thuds of cannon fire punctuated the air. It was the bird-deterrent system, the one that Syncrude had been a little slow to deploy in the spring of the previous year.

Let us hope that ducks find these noises either helpful or terrifying. Personally, I found it hard to tell where they were coming from. Had I been a duck, I would have wanted to land, to get my bearings and figure out just what the hell was going on. This also would have afforded me a closer look at the other bird-deterrent: a sparse posse of small, flag-like scarecrows that decorated the shore. Several more of the ragged little figures floated on lonely buoys in the middle of the lake.

The mines themselves were nowhere visible, but at the north end of the lake rose the Syncrude upgrading plant, the flame-belching doppelgänger of Disney’s Enchanted Kingdom, built of steel towers and twisting pipes, crested with gas flares and plumes of steam. A hot, wavering stain of transparent yellow rose from one smokestack, drawing a narrow stripe across the sky.

Oil sands contain a heavy form of petroleum called bitumen, which must go through several stages of upgrading at a plant like this before it can enter a refinery. But before it can even be upgraded, it must be separated from the vast quantities of sand that are its host. This first step takes place mine-side, where the sand is mixed with water and then heated, separating out the layer of bitumen that clings to each grain of sand. You have here two issues: the use of massive amounts of water—in this case drawn from the Athabasca River—and the incredible volumes of natural gas required to heat it.

The separated bitumen is then piped to the upgrading plant, where—using yet another unimaginable amount of energy—it is put through a series of distillations and cracking processes to break it down into smaller, more manageable hydrocarbons. Only then can the result—called synthetic crude oil —be sent off to a refinery for the production of gasoline, jet fuel, and ziplock bags.

I hung a left, following the loop that would take me past the front gate, around the tailings pond, and back toward town. Just west of the plant was the sulfur storage area, though to call it a “sulfur storage area” is like calling the pyramids a “stone storage area.”

One byproduct of Syncrude’s industrial process is a monumental quantity of sulfur, for which it has neither a use nor a market. So it stores the stuff, pouring it into solid yellow slabs, one hulking yellow level on top of the last, building what is now a trio of vast, flat-topped ziggurats fifty or sixty feet tall and up to a quarter mile wide. Like everything else around here, they may be some of the largest man-made objects in history—but I had never heard of them before. A pyramid of sulfur just isn’t news, I guess. They are less scandalous than a city-size hole in the ground, and only a very determined duck could get itself killed by one.