Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

by Andrew Blackwell

  But it’s hard to hear that argument over the incredible grumbling sound coming from the collective stomach of the United States. It sees Canada’s oil as a possible route to so-called energy independence, which is another way of saying “oil without Muslims,” and it wants nothing more than for Canada to rip the green, boreal top right off the entire province of Alberta and shake all that black, sandy goodness directly into a refinery. And that drives environmentalists batshit crazy with rage.

  Fort McMurray lies in a splendid isolation of forest and swamp, nearly three hundred miles north of Edmonton, the provincial capital and nearest major city. As with most boomtowns, it’s tempting to call Fort McMurray a shithole, but its attempt at wretchedness is halfhearted. For every corner of town that is dingy or low-rent, there is one that is tidy and clean. For example, Franklin Avenue: there is the Oil Sands Hotel, its yellow sign illustrated with large, orange oil drops. A narrow marquee boasts, CHEQUES CASHED, LOW RATES, RENOVATED ROOMS 99.00, ATM IN LOBBY, EXOTIC DANCERS MONDAY-SATURDAY 430-1AM. Across the way, as counterbalance, are the city hall and provincial buildings, a pair of sleek brick cubes that project an orderly municipal competence. At seven and nine stories, they are the tallest things in town. The next block down you’ll find the Boomtown Casino, busy even at midnight on a Tuesday, as the people of Fort McMurray feed their oil sands money into slot machines.

  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 byproduc
t 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.

  One day, though, Syncrude or its successors will see these vast—huge, monumental, gargantuan, monolithic—objects for the opportunity they are. Tourists of the future will summit their grand steps, and stay in sulfur hotels carved out of their depths, and sip yellow cocktails, and attend championship tennis matches at the Syncrude Open, for which the players will use blue tennis balls, for visibility on the sulfur courts. Thousands of years later, explorers bushwhacking through the jungles of northern Cameximeriga will stumble onto them and be dazzled by the simplicity of our temple architecture, at once brutal and grand, and will speculate about what drove us to worship sulfur above all other elements, and will see that the pharaohs were nitwits.

  Although the mines sit at a breezy remove, their presence is felt everywhere in Fort McMurray. The economy and community thrum in tune with the ceaseless project of ground-eating. As you meander the streets, you begin to feel that you are an iron filing oriented along the field lines emanating from an immense subterranean magnet, and that everything and everyone in town is pointed toward it: the new bridge over the Athabasca, built to withstand the load of heavy equipment being transported to the work site; traffic lights that can be swung sideways out of the roadway to let oversize loads pass unhindered; the local high school (mascot: the Miners; motto: “Miner Pride”); the old excavating machine sitting on the lawn of Heritage Park.

  You feel it standing on a wooded bluff overlooking the river, where the air stinks of bitumen oozing naturally out of the hillside, and where nearly a century ago the first hopeful entrepreneur tried to boil money out of oil sands. And you feel it downtown at the Tim Hortons, where white pickup trucks line up around the corner to get their coffee and doughnuts. Each white pickup truck carries someone on his way to work at the mines, and each white pickup truck has a tall, whiplike antenna sprouting from its bed, and they are not antennas but safety flags. Without one, even a large pickup truck may go unnoticed by the behemoth sand haulers in the mine, and be crushed.

  Even at leisure, people in Fort McMurray live out an echo of their industry, taking their minds off the noisy machines of the mines by churning through the countryside on other noisy machines, like all-terrain-vehicles and snowmobiles (known as sleds).

  “Ninety percent of people who live here have at least one ATV or sled,” said Colleen, the young woman behind the counter at the off-roading store. She and her colleague Adam were Fort McMurray natives, rarities in a city overrun by outsiders coming for work, and they had a blasé defensiveness about their hometown. Colleen seemed almost to rue the economic boom that had transformed it. “The recession sucks and all, but in ways it’s amazing,” she said. “Now you can go to a restaurant and not wait three hours. You can get a doctor’s appointment. Before, if your car broke down, it would take nine weeks to get it fixed. The quality of life was getting really low before the recession happened. Everything was a struggle.”

  But that didn’t mean they thought the oil sands themselves were a bad thing. “Fort McMurray is what’s powering all of Canada, and we don’t get the recognition,” Colleen said, picking up a tiny brown dog bouncing at her feet. “I think that whole ‘dirty oil’ thing comes from a lobbying group in Saudi.”

  “The ducks,” Adam said, completing the conspiracy theory.

  Colleen snorted. “Yeah, fuck! There’s so many more important things. Like consumer waste!”

  Through Fort McMurray Tourism, anyone who signs up a day ahead and forks over forty bucks can take an oil sands bus tour. Oil sands bus tour—are there any four words more beautiful in the English language? Someone was finally seeing the light on this pollution tourism thing. I signed up.

  The bus tour didn’t leave until the following morning, so I had a lonely afternoon to kill. I called my girlfriend. The Doctor. She always knows what to do in these situations. She has a peculiar kind of common sense that includes the possibility that spending your days roaming oil sands mines and nuclear disaster sites might be a good idea.

  “Remember,” she said over the phone, “you’re supposed to be on vacation.”

  Right! I was a tourist. And although the world’s industrial eyesores and ecological calamities generally languish unattended by gift shops and welcome centers, Fort McMurray is a forward-thinking town in this regard. I made for the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, a family-friendly museum for those interested in the local industry.

  The OSDC represents some of the best industrial propaganda in the world. (Which I mean as a compliment. You try writing the brochure for Mordor.) Its gift shop is a gift shop among gift shops, an emporium thick with toy giant dump trucks, kid-size hard hats, watercolor prints of gigantic machines, and truck-themed socks. I grabbed an armful of goodies. At the register, I made the find of the day in a bin of impulse buys: a tiny, plush oil drop with yellow feet and googly eyes. Who knew petroleum could be so adorable?

  Into the exhibits, where I spent the next several hours in a state of fizzing excitement over scale models of dragline shovels and bucket-wheel extractors, over containers holding liquid bitumen in different states—room temperature, heated, diluted—with rods to stir the stuff and feel the different viscosities. Not to mention the 150-ton oil sands truck parked inside the exhibit hall. I climbed two stories up, into its cab, and sat in the driver’s seat, wrenching the steering wheel back and forth.

  And now let us praise the Dig and Sniff, in which a small mound of raw oil sand is displayed under a plastic dome. The Dig and Sniff invites you simply to dig, using the rod built into the display—and then, having dug, to sniff, through the small opening in the dome. Dig and Sniff! With a name of such economy and force, it commands you to action, granting you a direct experience—modestly tactile, safely olfactory—of the oil sands themselves.

  A young boy worked the scraper. “This thing is cool!” he cried, sticking his nose into the dome. “Dad, come smell the oil sand! The Discover Center’s fun.” We were living inside a commercial for the OSDC. I took my turn at the stand, ready to get down to business.

  I dug. I sniffed.

  Frankly, it didn’t smell like much. Maybe it needed a fresh batch of sand. But had I not already learned something? That oil sand may sometimes lose its aroma?

  You could be forgiven for assuming—it would be weird if you didn’t—that the OSDC was created by the oil sands companies themselves, as a temple to their own name. But among its many triumphs in industrial propaganda, surely the greatest is that it is actually a government facility, operated and administered by the province of Alberta itself. You can draw your own conclusions about what this seamless collaboration says about the relationship between oil and government around these parts.

  Underneath all the excitement, though, there was a sour note—a defensive, self-conscious tone that sometimes crept into the wall copy. I could feel the exhibit designers grudgingly trying to account for that one spoilsport in each group, the one who would be asking over and over about the trees, and the rivers, and the ducks.

  Toward the end of the galleries, past a backwater of displays about environmental responsibility and the future of clean energy and other boring crap, I found the Play Lab, a colorful area partially screened off from the rest of the hall by a metal space-frame. Child-size tables and chairs sat in the center of the room, attended by a wardrobe of hard hats and jumpsuits available on loan to the tiny oil sands engineers of tomorrow.

  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.