NEWS: As Canada scrambles to dig up some of the world's dirtiest oil, a bush doctor tracks mysterious diseases, poisoned rivers, and shattered lives.
By Josh Harkinson
May/June 2008 Issue
At a small airport in the northern Alberta town of Fort McMurray, a rickety, single-engine Cessna hurtles off the ground with a roar. Dr. John O'Connor ignores the shuddering fuselage, the tail wiggle, the steep climb above the spruce trees at the end of the runway. For O'Connor, a bush doctor who has tended to some of Canada's most remote Native American communities for more than a decade, this October morning is the start of a routine commute. In his fleece vest and green fedora, the small, middle-aged Irishman looks simultaneously rugged and elfin. A plastic tray of fruit salad vibrates beneath his seat, a gift for locals who are used to subsisting on moose, pickerel, and muskrat.
Outside, a carpet of boreal forest unfurls at the southern edge of town. Our plane flies past suburban subdivisions, freshly paved culs-de-sac, and what O'Connor says is the largest trailer park in North America. As we head north, tracking the steep banks of the Athabasca River, the forest returns. And then the trees quickly vanish, along with everything else, into miles and miles of rolling hills of sand. "The sand blows around like you wouldn't believe," O'Connor shouts over the propeller buzz. "Drive from Fort McMurray, and you will encounter what looks like a sandstorm."
Below, some 2 billion tons of soil and rock—"overburden," as the oil industry politely calls it—have been stripped away to reveal deposits of hydrocarbon-laced sandstone known as tar sands. Trucks that can carry up to 400 tons lumber across the subarctic expanse, hauling the oily muck out of terraced pits to "crushers" located in massive processing facilities.
The tar sands began forming 350 million years ago, when a prehistoric ocean deposited a layer of organic materials that was gradually cooked into a huge underground pool of light sweet crude beneath what became Alberta. Erosion made way for microorganisms that invaded the oil, forming a thick tar sandwiched between the forest above and the groundwater and limestone beneath. Along the banks of the Athabasca River, the black goop sometimes seeps through the sand as if Jed lampett just made another lucky strike.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/05/scenes-from-the-tar-wars.html
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