Bittersweet Sands Read Online Free Page B
rich. Fort McMurray is Joe Lunchpailâs Everest, and ultimately, Fort McMurray is a tragedy.
Fort McMurray suffers from the tragedy of too much. Too many men making too much money too fast. Too many half-civilized men disconnected from their families. Too many men getting treated like criminals by authorities who have good reason to. Fort McMurray has too much, too much of everything.
One of the few things Fort McMurray lacks is objectivity. Bring up Fort McMurray and half the country thinks itâs a Canadian treasure, the other half thinks itâs a national disgrace. They are both wrong, and they are both right.
The environmentalists sell the past, the oil companies sell the future, and they both slant their message.
Imagine Highway 63 as a tree, with the city of Fort McMurray at ground level. Other than a couple of them, most of the refineries are north of the city. The trunk of that imaginary tree climbs thirty-odd miles high before you pass the first refineries, Suncor and Syncrude. These oldest and biggest refineries sit east and west of Highway 63, like massive gatekeepers on either side of the road north.
Syncrude will always be the poster boy for dirty oil, simply because you can see it from the highway. You come over the hill and there it is, like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz ; Syncrude sits there, in all its chrome and dripping black oil splendour behind two vast settling ponds on either side of Highway 63.
The environmentalists donât even have to get out of their rented Volvos to take an incriminating picture of Syncrude. Itâs right there.
Chop down every tree, scrape away every plant, get rid of every animal. Dig. Collect fifty feet of oily, dripping sand in one bite, bubble massive amounts of water from the Athabasca River through that black sand, separate the crude, dump the used water in settling ponds so large that they can be seen from space.
The smell of the settling ponds is so pervasive that the construction workers call those squares of froth and stench âParadise Lakes.â
Animals are not wanted. To keep birds away, gay streamers are hung across the ponds, giving the place the look of a used car lot. Air cannons are continuously fired off at irregular intervals. Construction workers go to sleep in the camps to the faint thumping of air cannons in the distance.
Floating on the oily scum of those ponds are forty-five-gallon drums with scarecrows welded onto them, bobbing in the wind. In the summer, the construction workers call the scarecrows âThe Newfie Navy.â In the winter, frozen in that slushy oil and water mix, they are called âThe Newfie Hockey Team.â
Dump the sand as white and dead as ground-up skeletons back on some barren spot. Plant trees and moss like Astroturf on top of those huge mountains of inert sand. Spray six inches of topsoil, spread grass seed and mulched hay over the planted trees. Like a scene in some science fiction movie where aliens have created what they think is Earth. Step outside the reclaimed patch, and stretching for miles you see a tortured vista like a World War I battlefield.
This is the prevailing image of Fort McMurray, and it was an accurate image in the 1980s when I first went there. The whole attitude in Fort McMurray in the last century was âI got mine, let God replant.â And that is the story the environmentalists sell: that the technology is static, never-changing, locked in the methodology of the 1970s.
And itâs wrong. Environmentalists sell the past. When you see pictures in the media of things that arenât there anymore, you start wondering just how noble these environmentalistsâ intentions really are. Unless a picture of the Fort McMurray is date-stamped and its location identified, I discount it out of hand.
Because the drag-line and truck technology is getting less and less important each year. Think about it. Moving sand is really expensive. Oil companies, being oil
Fort McMurray suffers from the tragedy of too much. Too many men making too much money too fast. Too many half-civilized men disconnected from their families. Too many men getting treated like criminals by authorities who have good reason to. Fort McMurray has too much, too much of everything.
One of the few things Fort McMurray lacks is objectivity. Bring up Fort McMurray and half the country thinks itâs a Canadian treasure, the other half thinks itâs a national disgrace. They are both wrong, and they are both right.
The environmentalists sell the past, the oil companies sell the future, and they both slant their message.
Imagine Highway 63 as a tree, with the city of Fort McMurray at ground level. Other than a couple of them, most of the refineries are north of the city. The trunk of that imaginary tree climbs thirty-odd miles high before you pass the first refineries, Suncor and Syncrude. These oldest and biggest refineries sit east and west of Highway 63, like massive gatekeepers on either side of the road north.
Syncrude will always be the poster boy for dirty oil, simply because you can see it from the highway. You come over the hill and there it is, like the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz ; Syncrude sits there, in all its chrome and dripping black oil splendour behind two vast settling ponds on either side of Highway 63.
The environmentalists donât even have to get out of their rented Volvos to take an incriminating picture of Syncrude. Itâs right there.
Chop down every tree, scrape away every plant, get rid of every animal. Dig. Collect fifty feet of oily, dripping sand in one bite, bubble massive amounts of water from the Athabasca River through that black sand, separate the crude, dump the used water in settling ponds so large that they can be seen from space.
The smell of the settling ponds is so pervasive that the construction workers call those squares of froth and stench âParadise Lakes.â
Animals are not wanted. To keep birds away, gay streamers are hung across the ponds, giving the place the look of a used car lot. Air cannons are continuously fired off at irregular intervals. Construction workers go to sleep in the camps to the faint thumping of air cannons in the distance.
Floating on the oily scum of those ponds are forty-five-gallon drums with scarecrows welded onto them, bobbing in the wind. In the summer, the construction workers call the scarecrows âThe Newfie Navy.â In the winter, frozen in that slushy oil and water mix, they are called âThe Newfie Hockey Team.â
Dump the sand as white and dead as ground-up skeletons back on some barren spot. Plant trees and moss like Astroturf on top of those huge mountains of inert sand. Spray six inches of topsoil, spread grass seed and mulched hay over the planted trees. Like a scene in some science fiction movie where aliens have created what they think is Earth. Step outside the reclaimed patch, and stretching for miles you see a tortured vista like a World War I battlefield.
This is the prevailing image of Fort McMurray, and it was an accurate image in the 1980s when I first went there. The whole attitude in Fort McMurray in the last century was âI got mine, let God replant.â And that is the story the environmentalists sell: that the technology is static, never-changing, locked in the methodology of the 1970s.
And itâs wrong. Environmentalists sell the past. When you see pictures in the media of things that arenât there anymore, you start wondering just how noble these environmentalistsâ intentions really are. Unless a picture of the Fort McMurray is date-stamped and its location identified, I discount it out of hand.
Because the drag-line and truck technology is getting less and less important each year. Think about it. Moving sand is really expensive. Oil companies, being oil
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