By Christopher Frey / Photographs by Lorne Bridgman
Thursday, August 7, 2008, 6:30 p.m.
Highway 63, 30 kms north of Fort McMurray (note 1)
A RUSSIAN FUTURIST’S FANTASY: The EnCana site at Christina Lake
We’re stuck in traffic – not an uncommon place to find oneself in and around Fort McMurray, lodged firmly amidst a single-file convoy of buggy-whip sporting pickups, overgrown SUVs, buses, tanker trucks and semi-trailers hauling what appear to be the apparatus (turbines, boilers) for building a spaceship. This “rush hour” began two hours ago.
My photographer friend Lorne and I are pointed south. In our rear mirror looms Syncrude’s massive Mildred Lake plant, opened in 1978 and still the largest of Alberta’s oil sands operations. Unfortunately, this narrow two-lane highway is of the same vintage. Three decades and more than $50 billion of oil sands investment later, the road has yet to be adequately upgraded to manage the behemoth loads it carries – or the steady stream of bonanza-hungry new arrivals.
This mass exodus we’re trapped inside is merely a shift change. Inside the plants, a new contingent is punching in, pushing back the night to ceaselessly exploit the resource that first made it possible to push back the night. Cheap illumination, as kerosene, is what drove the first oil boom of the 1860s. Electricity almost put oil out of business. Then the automobile came along. Which, by virtue of some human evolutionary tangent, might explain why a half-hour later we’re still lurching forward according to the jam-up’s frustrating logic.
At the top of the hour we tune into CBC Radio for the news. Georgian security forces have moved into breakaway South Ossetia, clashing with separatist fighters. Russian troops have already been mobilized to support the Ossetians and are also pouring into Georgia’s other autonomous region, Abkhazia. The confrontation is long overdue. Both zones have been nominally independent from Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital, since 1992, functioning with the support of a Russia long eager to reassert authority in its “near abroad.” Notably, Georgia is also home to the only pipeline ferrying Central Asian oil to Europe that doesn’t travel through Russia.
Canada is already the largest supplier of oil to the United States, but it would seem the oil sands’ newfound prominence as a stable source of energy is reinforced daily. For much of July, rebels in the Niger Delta wreaked havoc on production in Nigeria, the world’s eighth largest oil exporter, shutting down offshore platforms and tampering with pipelines as is their habit. Meanwhile, resource nationalism has become the defining gambit of not only Russia, but also other oil- and gas-endowed nations such as Venezuela and Bolivia, making it increasingly difficult for multinational oil companies to open new fields.
Fort McMurray and the oil sands, meanwhile, are enthusiastically open for business, 24/7. All the familiar big players are here, as are the Norwegians, the Japanese, the Dutch, the French, the Chinese. Now if only this damn highway would start moving again.
With his classic handlebar moustache and barrel chest of superhero proportions, it’s not surprising that Constable Tyler Roddick-Ament is the most photographed member of the local RCMP detachment. “Whenever they need someone to wear the red serge for a picture, it’s usually me,” he says. “Fortunately, I don’t have any ambitions to work undercover.”
Tonight, Roddick-Ament is riding a desk, dealing with prisoner issues and walk-in complaints. On other shifts he’ll be out patrolling, looking for impaired drivers, executing arrest warrants, completing paperwork or following up on his own investigations. As we chat in a windowless interrogation room, I’m curious what he thinks of the over-heated newspaper prose that Fort McMurray typically inspires, journalists like me, more soft-headed than hardboiled, channelling their inner Dashiel Hammet. Roddick-Ament doesn’t bother refuting the city’s oft-reported struggles with violence, drugs and prostitution, but he does put them in context.
Growth has been nine per cent for the past five years,” he says. “Three per cent is outrageous, one per cent is manageable. But nine per cent is something we don’t have the mechanisms to cope with. We’re a city now and we have the same problems as Edmonton or Calgary: more cars on the road, more money in town, and more people at loose ends.”
Category: Work
Leave a Reply
