
Fingers are being pointed after hundreds of ducks were found dead or dying in a toxic tailings pond belonging to oilsands giant Syncrude Canada Ltd. CTV Edmonton's Joel Gotlib told Newsnet on Wednesday that it's the worst such incident in the history of northern Alberta's oilsands. Environmentalists are furious, governments are demanding answers and Syncrude -- located about 40 kilometres north of Fort McMurray -- is scrambling to contain the damage, he said. The tailings ponds are formed during the oilsands extraction process, Miles Kitagawa of the Alberta Toxics Watch Society told CTV.ca on Wednesday. "Syncrude utilizes something called the Clark hot water process, where they crush bitumen-containing oil, mix it with heated water and use that to separate the bitumen out of the ore," he said. The leftover water is dumped in the tailings ponds, which contain a mixture of clay, sand water and hydrocarbons, he said. Drinking a glass of water from a tailings pond would be like drinking a diluted glass of oil or gasoline, Kitagawa said. The ponds are supposed to have measures in place that keep migrating waterfowl from landing on the ponds, such as scarecrows and noisemakers. In a news release issued Tuesday, Syncrude's president and CEO Tom Katinas said noisemakers had been deployed at all the company's other tailings ponds. "However, due to the extreme winter weather conditions in the region last week, the deployment of these devices on the Aurora Settling Basin was delayed <b>...</b>
Ed
Stelmach
Alberta
Oil
Sands
polution
ducks
die
Syncrude
tailings
ponds
Aurora
Settling
Basin
waterfowl
Norman
Mc
Gregor