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

Ignoring the cues that I fell somewhat outside the Play Lab’s target demographic, I charged in, blazing my way through the PUMP IT exhibit—a wall of clear plastic pipes with valves to twist and a crank to turn—before settling in for a spell at DIG IT, which featured a pair of toy backhoe shovels and a trough filled with fake oil sand.

Neeeat!

The last section of the Play Lab was GUESS IT, a large grid of spinning panels printed with questions on one side and answers on the other. Somewhere an exhibit designer, worried about how much fun the rest of the Play Lab was, had caved in to the didactic urge. I read the first panel.

Bitumen is a very simple molecule. True or false?

Duh! We’re talking about hydrocarbons, here. False. Next question.

Oil sand is like the filling in a sandwich. True or false?

Uh, true?

True. The top slice is overburden, oil sand is the gooey filling, and the bottom slice is limestone. Yummy!

I no longer had the lab to myself. An elderly couple had entered and, after a cursory look at the shovels, were now having a go at PUMP IT. I turned back to GUESS IT.

Who is responsible for protecting the environment? a) the government, b) the oil sands companies, c) everyone.

It was that defensive tone. I didn’t need to turn the panel to know what GUESS IT wanted me to say. The only question was whether children were really the Play Lab’s target audience after all.

The highway north of Fort McMurray is so small, relative to the thousands of workers who need to get to the work sites every day, that traffic can be terrible, especially during shift changes. So the oil sands companies hire buses to ferry workers to and from town. Ubiquitous red and white Diversified Transportation coaches ply the highway in pods. That an industry partly responsible for Canada blowing its emission-reduction goals has a thriving rideshare program is just one of the tidy, spring-loaded ironies that jump out at you here.

The Suncor bus tour leaves from in front of the OSDC—I stole in for a quick taste of the Dig and Sniff—and it employs one of those same Diversified buses, re-tasked for our touristic needs. Mindy, our perky young tour guide, popped up in front and asked us to buckle our seat belts. “Safety,” she said, “is one of our number-one priorities.” The driver gunned the engine and we were off, about to be taken, Universal Studios-style, through an open wound on the world’s single largest deposit of petroleum. What soaring cliffs and hulking machinery did the day hold for us?

The bus was nearly full, mostly with families and seniors—people who looked like they had seen the inside of a few tour buses. A quartet of old ladies giggled like they were on a Saturday-night joyride. Sitting next to me was a Mr. Ganapathi, an old Indian man with a single, twisting tooth jutting from his lower jaw.

“You are married?” he asked.

I wasn’t, I said. But I thought of the Doctor. It wasn’t a bad idea.

By now we were passing along the eastern edge of the large tailings pond in front of Syncrude.

“Is this where all those ducks got killed?” a man asked his wife.

“Oh, we’ve had more fuss over those ducks!” she said.

There had indeed been more fuss. The governments of Canada and Alberta had decided to prosecute Syncrude for failing to repulse the ducks from the tailings pond. There would be a not-guilty plea, and complaints from Syncrude that it was being unfairly prosecuted for what amounted to a mistake but not a crime, and counter-complaints from environmentalists that Syncrude was getting off easy. In the end, Syncrude would be found guilty and fined $3 million—$1,868 Canadian for each duck. And if those sound like expensive ducks, keep in mind that in 2009 Syncrude made $3 million in profit every single day.

We stepped down from the bus near the Syncrude plant—it hissed in the distance—to visit a pair of retired mining machines. You needn’t take the bus tour to see them, though, as they are probably visible from space. I had never seen such machines. A dragline excavator stood on the right; on the left, a bucket-wheel reclaimer.

These days, oil sands mining uses shovels and trucks in a setup that has a nice scoop-and-haul simplicity to it. But this system is relatively recent. Previously, companies used a system of draglines, bucket wheels, and conveyor belts. With a dragline excavator (a machine probably bigger than your house), a bucket-like shovel hanging on cables from a soaring steel boom would gather up a bucketful of sand—and we’re talking about a bucketful the size of…the size of…hell, I don’t know. What’s bigger than an Escalade but smaller than a bungalow? Big, okay? The dragline would swing around, using the huge reach of the boom, and drop the sand behind it. It would then inch along the face of the mine, walking—actually walking —on gigantic, skid-like feet, repeating the process over and over, leaving behind it a line of excavated sand called a windrow.

Then the reclaimer would come in, turning its bucket wheel through the sand in the windrow, lifting it onto a conveyor belt on its back, which fed another conveyor belt, and another, transporting the sand great distances out of the pit. There were once thirty kilometers’ worth of conveyor belts operating in Syncrude’s mine, and if you’ve ever tried to keep a conveyor belt running during a harsh northern winter—who hasn’t?—you’ve got an idea of why they finally opted for the shovel-and-truck method.

To approach the bucket-wheel reclaimer was to slide into a gravity well of disbelief. It was difficult even to understand its shape. It was longer than a football field, battleship gray, its conveyor belt spine running aft on a bridge large enough to carry traffic. The machine’s shoulders were an irregular metal building several stories tall, overgrown with struts and gangways and ductwork, hunched over a colossal set of tank treads. A vast, counterweighted trunk soared over it all, thrusting forward a fat tunnel of trusses that finally blossomed into the great steel sun of the bucket wheel.

The wheel itself was more than forty feet tall, with two dozen steel mouths gaping from its rim, each worthy of a tyrannosaur, with teeth as large as human forearms. I stared up at it, nursing a euphoric terror, imagining how it once churned through the earth, lifting ton after ton of oily sand as it went. There was something wonderful about the fearsome improbability of the reclaimer’s existence. It was the bastard offspring of the Eiffel Tower and the Queensboro Bridge, abandoned by its parents, raised by feral tanks.

As my tourmates took pictures of one another standing in front of the behemoth, I walked back to the bus, where the driver was standing with his hands in his pockets. His name was Mohammed. The Suncor bus tour was only a minor part of his job. He spent most of his days ferrying workers to and from the mines. When I asked why he didn’t choose to drive one of the big trucks instead of a bus, he told me he wasn’t interested.

“But you could make a lot of money,” I said. The salary for driving a heavy hauler started at about a hundred thousand dollars—more if you worked a shovel.

He smiled. “The pollution. Especially at the live sites, Suncor and Syncrude.” He thought the air coming off the upgrading plants was bad for your health.

“But you breathe that air anyway,” I pointed out. “You drive onto those sites all the time!”

He laughed. “Yeah!”

The supposed centerpiece of the Suncor bus tour is of course Suncor itself. We entered from the highway, the air sweet with tar, and drove toward the Athabasca River into an area invisible from the road. My oil sands fever was reaching its crisis. The upgrading plant slid into view, a forest of pipes and towers similar to the Syncrude plant, but nestled next to the river in a shallow, wooded valley.