SAINTS PRESERVE US

Keep Calm and Ostrich On 

Personal trauma? Bury it. A troublesome corpse? Bury it. Evidence of corporate malfeasance? Bury it. Scandalous allegations of ineptitude, corruption, sex and graft? Bury them. Commissioned studies that don’t arrive at a desired conclusion? Bury them. Mountains of refuse? Bury them. Used radioactive metals? Bury them. Carbon emissions? Bury them.

We bury everything, including history. And just when I figured there was nothing left to bury excepting a few old grudges of mine, Alberta strong and free in all her majesty and an outlier on Canada’s political scene, is seriously contemplating burying water. But not just any kind of water.

Many commodities are buried too, they must be mined, quarried or dredged. Consider sand beyond Vaseline, beach volleyball and a sunny holiday. It’s the bed under a properly paved road. It’s in glass and concrete. It’s the abrasive in fracking fluid – which is mainly composed of water. Sand in some form is as omnipresent as water in your life. The manufacturer of your shampoo likely lists its main ingredient as aqua. When Nestle sells 500 mL of your own tap water back to you, it used way more water than that to produce its convenient plastic container. Clean water, like sand, is a highly valued industrial commodity.

Alberta is Confederation’s angry mini-petro state, a province with republican fantasies. The source of its mismanaged resource wealth and its tired boom or bust economic cycle is the tar sands, gooey fossil fuel deposits up north around Fort McMurray. Extracting heavy bitumen and gussying it up for further downstream refinement requires a lot of fresh water. When I wash the sand-based crockery here at the Crooked 9, I fill the kitchen sink with potable water though I wouldn’t drink it after my chore is done because I know my greywater is a tepid soup of detergent and diluted debris and, anyway, it would taste like McDonald’s coffee. I open the drain knowing it will be treated and maybe even come through my tap again one day. Tar sands wastewater is something of a misnomer. It’s liquid slag whose additives include bitumen, sand and chemicals. As sludgy as most of Led Zeppelin’s catalogue. It’s collected, pooled in artificial basins called tailings ponds. They tend to leak and their toxins tend to seep or spill downstream. They do look good from above, ask a dead duck.

A commission convened by the United Conservative government of Alberta to study the environmental impact of tailings ponds (something of a shock in itself) and chaired by the Honourable Member from Fort McMurray suggests one solution to dispose of mining wastewater is burying it. Naturally, the effluence would be decontaminated before interment deep within the earth’s crust. If that’s the case, I wonder why it’ll still need to be buried. Tailings injections bring us halfway to China and the world of Jules Verne, drilling down into impermeable rock. Suitable sites aren’t abundant. Proposed captured carbon storage sites compete for space. Draining tailings ponds will necessitate pipelines. The Universal Law of Wham! applies to pipelines as much as anything else: If you’re gonna do it, do it right, now! Pipelines are efficient conduits, but improper installation and neglectful maintenance are valid concerns because there’s a whiff of Boeing ineptitude wafting over past projects. And there’s no revenue in moving dirty water and no profitable payoff to be realized in goodwill.

Love Canal was neither a soap opera nor a porn flick. Evidence has surfaced showing fracking fluids will eventually permeate groundwater. Still in dispute is whether their highly pressured injection into subterranean rock fissures triggers earthquakes. So. What could possibly go wrong burying mining wastewater tailings?

I don’t know. I’m no cynic; I’m a realist whose brain is pop culture wired. All I can picture is that last scene in Carrie. Nothing buried stays that way. As for ostriches, I assume it’s best not to see it coming.                     

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. Sunset Oasis Confidential is out now in multiple formats. Visit my revitalized companion site www.megeoff.com for links to your preferred retailer*. Of Course You Did is still available.

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