Living downstream from one of the world’s largest industrial projects isn’t easy — especially when things go wrong. When the community of Fort Chipewyan in Alberta, Canada, learned there had been a major spill of toxic wastewater from Imperial Oil’s Kearl tar sands site, it was chaos, says Melaine Dene, acting director of the Mikisew Cree First Nation’s department of government and industry relations. The remote community of nearly 800 mostly Indigenous people, better known simply as Fort Chip, sits on the southwest shore of Lake Athabasca, about 250 kilometers (155 miles) downriver from the oil sands, a sprawling industrial complex of open-pit mines, smokestacks and tailings ponds in the boreal forest. In January 2023, 5.3 million liters (1.4 million gallons) of toxic water filled with mining waste, or tailings, overflowed from one of the drainage ditches at the Imperial facility. But the public didn’t learn of the spill until days later, when the Alberta Energy Regulator (AER), the provincial agency that oversees energy development, posted an environmental protection order (EPO) on its website. And the EPO came with another shocking surprise: a second drainage ditch had been seeping toxic wastewater into groundwater for at least nine months. Neither AER nor Imperial Oil directly notified Indigenous leadership about the spill or the ongoing leakage. Fort Chipewyan draws its drinking water from Lake Athabasca, and when news broke, people feared the waterbody was contaminated, Dene says. Her first priority was to make sure the community had safe drinking water. In winter,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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