Lori Flynn, whose husband also works at Suncor, says this is common. “When you have a choice,” she says, “and one of you needs to do nights because of the children, it’s usually the woman who does it.”
“My husband can’t stand it,” Pazhayattil adds. “If he misses one night’s sleep he will whine for a month.”
“When I’m at work, I’m fine,” Flynn elaborates. “I have just as much to give my patients if I’m working night or day. But when I’m home I feel like I don’t have as much to give my children. I love gardening, but when I’m working nights I’m a vegetable the rest of the time.”
Fort Mac’s prosperity has made the two nurses veritable midwives to a corresponding baby boom. Over one year, the hospital has gone from delivering 70 babies per month to about 110. A couple days ago, four babies were born within 20 minutes. It’s the trademark Fort Mac story. It’s impossible just to keep up. Like everything else here, the hospital is short of staff, needs newer medical equipment and bigger facilities. Yet no matter how much wealth Fort McMurray and the oil sands generate for Albertans, the municipality has to plead with the provincial government for the resources it desperately needs.
“This could be dangerous,” Julian Arsenault announces. He’s straddling a pipe and begins turning the valve that will release hot condensate into cold air.
Is he joking? The pipe is connected to a new well that needs to be tested every six hours. Arsenault hauls on the valve’s wheel slowly, a quarter turn at a time, then pauses. Van Maarion stands behind me. You can faintly hear the rumbling of hot meeting cold. Do this too quickly and the pipe can rupture, with disastrous results. Months ago, a worker at Christina Lake opened a valve too fast and the whole thing burst, the severed pipeline violently snaking out of control, spewing out oil and steam.
Arsenault cranks the valve another quarter turn. A slight clanking. This is about as exciting as tonight will get. They both apologize, with a laugh, for the lack of drama.
A short while later, the crew congregates in the control room. Arsenault is shopping online for guitar amplifiers, insisting “you can never have too many!” The veteran Sneider, however, quietly slips back outside to roam the plant. The night shift is his favourite time to work: there are fewer bosses around, affording him the opportunity to pursue what he calls his “little projects.” He studies how to optimize the plant’s performance, sometimes through trial-and-error tinkering, or by reviewing the geologists’ reports and graphs. It’s hardly the sort of experimental, improvised stuff that was typical of his early days in Saskatchewan, but it seems to sustain his creative streak.
Inside the control room, Greg Verreau and Van Maarion are watching the computer monitors that map out the plant’s current flows, outputs and inputs—it looks like the most complicated flow chart I’ve ever seen. Occasionally, a low-volume siren will sound, and Verreau will tap on the keyboard, adjust a value, and the alarm will go away.
I ask Verreau who designed the systems software.
“Ha. Gorillas, I think.”
Although the control room is nondescript, it’s only from here that one grasps how intricately woven is the whole SAGD system. If there’s a major problem anywhere along the line – in steam generation or water recycling, for example, or if the oil coming out of the system is not up to pipeline specifications – a cascade effect ensues that threatens to shut down the entire plant.
“If we have a power bump or lightning strike – which is common out here – the generators go down automatically,” Arsenault says. “And when they go down you have a finite amount of time, like a few hours, to get them re-started. Or else we lose the whole plant.”
Terms like “PPM ratios,” “constantly running cuts” and “off-spec tanks” are mentioned And then I have a cascading effect of my own. Weird combinations of words keep coming out Van Maarion’s mouth, but his lips are out-of-sync like in a badly dubbed movie. Which probably means it’s time for one last coffee.
4:50 a.m. Franklin and Main, downtown
The buses line up, waiting to deliver the next shift of workers back to the plants. Tarry-eyed, they shuffle aboard and collapse into their seats.
All through the night, the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain” has been running through my head. (And playing occasionally on the mixed CD I burned for the car stereo.) The folk ballad, first recorded by railway brakeman and vaudevillian Harry McClintock in 1928, is a hobo’s fantasy of the trouble-free life, imagining “a land that’s fair and bright, where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night.” Best of all:
There’s a lake of stew and of whiskey too
You can paddle all around ’em in a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
While the song has always been associated with hoboes, McClintock was inspired by the realities of life among America’s underclass of itinerant workers. The oil sands labour force could hardly be described as an exploited underclass, but the pools of bitumen trapped beneath the earth here, and the six-figure salaries earned by mining them, surely make the oil sands Canada’s closest thing to a Big Rock Candy Mountain.
It’s why I was promised by so many, the majority of transients for sure, that they would quit the place soon enough. But I just as often heard that the money is too good. Which means many of those yearning to go will find an equally compelling reason to remain. And plenty more people will happily assume their place if they ever do leave.
U
issue 8
1. This story is actually a composite of three consecutive nights spent in Fort McMurray. It would be impossible to travel back and forth between Christina Lake and downtown Fort McMurray as described. The conflict between Russia and Georgia did erupt on August 7, however, and we heard the news, as written, on our way south from Mildred Lake.
Category: Work
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