Re: SC42

A friend (former Asian eminent newscaster now living in Australia) commented on a news item on Ft. McMurray. The news paragraphs are prefaced with RE and his comments follow in the next paragraph:

Re: There are some 35,000 people working in McMurray, their schedule is a twelve hour shift. four days work, then five days off. Work is continuous, no off time, one shift after another. The companies are still looking for laborers, the most highly paid in Canada. The dirty, used water and the tailings? We don't know what they do with it. They don't know either. It is dumped on the ground near the boiling towers. The smell of tar is all over, but the workers don't mind. They never got paid so well, so what?

There's no doubt about the greatness and bigness of the Athabasca tar baby. We could spend a whole hour describing Canada's tar sand mining boom. I won't even mention all the social problems associated with it, the problem of meth in Edmonton or crack in Calgary or Fort McMurray, which you say is known as Fort Crack. Drugs, alcohol, homicides, sex - these are expected in any boom area. Even the huge wages being taken home by workers is only one side of the picture. The other side is the extremely high cost of living , cost of commuting, etc. Buying a house is near impossible, the price tags are near the million dollar bracket.

Re: the total production now is 1.2 million barrels of oil a day.They ae digging pits and the pits are still small, only about 2 km. in diameter, and located only on about 100 sq. kilometers of land. The total of leased lands for mining now is over 75,000 square kilometers. You are right about the amount of water needed, but Canada has lots of fresh water, and lots of natural gas. Of course, these resoures will not last forever.

What is really worrying is the water consumption and wastage. For example, for every barrel of oil produced by Suncorp, as many as 8 barrels of water are pumped out from the Athabasa River. This river flows through the oil sands. According to the most recent figures, in 2004 Suncorp sucked out almost 46 billion barrels of water from the river. Suncorp claims they recycle 75 percent of this but where is it? You won't find any rcycled water around. All you'll see are tanks for toxic waste, some of these holding tanks are as big as 15 square kilometers, And they estimate that all their current and future projects will require 175 million liters of water a day - and that just for Suncorp!

The Eskimos who live upriver are complaining that the quality and quantity of their water is deteriorating, in some places the Athabasa, which is part of the McKenzie watershed, has fallen as much as 10 feet. Birdlife has fled and what fish remaining in the river have changed color.

And in a strange development, while the honeybees are dying, the beetles are coming! Pine beetles are invading millions of acres of Canadian pine forests and the dead pines turn red, Global warming now enables them to cross the Rcckies and get into BC. There's no stopping them, scientists say they will soon get into the US. As if there weren't enough problems with pollution, toxic toothpaste, pets being poisoned, jihadists trying to blow up JFK airport and disappearing bees, now it's rampaging beetles. Maraming sakit sa ulo.