TWO DISASTERS IN ALBERTA, CANADA
The Tar Sands wreak havoc on the environment in the north, while the Bow river floods Oil Town Calgary in the south
By Tracy W.
The province of Alberta was in the news this past week as raging waters from the Bow River innundated the city of Calgary and other southern Alberta localities. It's a major disaster, as downtown businesses and residences all over town were completely flooded. The material loss is enormous.
The resulting emotional trauma is incalculable. Many people have literally lost everything they owned. The water in many basements reached eight feet. Houses were wrenched from their foundations and carried away by the waters. Power outages could last for months. The number of fatalities was small, but each one is a major tragedy for their loved ones.
Calgary is also known as Oil Town, the hub where deals are made and fortunes are built.
Higher up north is the region known as the TAR SANDS. A huge scar in the earth where oversized machinery and oversized trucks and oversized greed extract oil. - Where once there was pristine nature full of living things, today there is an ever expanding ecological disaster zone - all in the name of economic development.
Precious water is being wasted and contaminated in the process of oil extraction. The soil is forever toxic, lifeless. The air is foul. This is a disaster of such magnitude that it is visible from the Space Station. Tens of thousands of migratory birds have perished in the Tar Sands poisonous tailings ponds sludge.
See pictures of Tar Sands muddy moonscape on articles below.
National Geographic article : The giant dump trucks that rumble around the mine, hauling 400-ton loads from the shovels to a rock crusher, burn 50 gallons of diesel fuel an hour each. And every day in the Athabasca Valley, more than a million tons of sand emerges from such crushers and is mixed with more than 200,000 tons of water that must be heated to wash out the gluey bitumen.
At the upgraders, the bitumen gets heated again, to about 900°F, and compressed to more than 100 atmospheres—that's what it takes to crack the complex molecules and either subtract carbon or add back the hydrogen the bacteria removed ages ago. That's what it takes to make the light hydrocarbons we need to fill our gas tanks.
Canadian Geographic picture and article on Tar Sands: it wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the Athabasca oil sands were launched on today’s bitumen mega-arc - bitumen being the thick, tarlike hydrocarbon extracted from the sands and refined into synthetic crude oil.
Nature lashes out:
National Post photos of an enraged Bow river as it devastates the city of Calgary just this past week:
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