by Ruth Kamnitzer on 16 July 2024

• Canada’s tar sands are the fourth-largest oil deposit in the world, but separating the bitumen creates large volumes of toxic wastewater, which is stored in tailings ponds that now cover 270 km² (104 mi²). Many experts warn that contaminants from mining and the tailings ponds are entering the environment
• In 2023, 5.3 million liters (1.4 million gallons) of industrial wastewater breached a tailings pond at a tar sands site in Alberta province, raising fears in an Indigenous downstream community. Then the town learned a second tailings pond had been leaking toxic wastewater for at least nine months.
• In March 2024, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation sued the Alberta Energy Regulator over its poor handling of the spills along with alleged regulatory failures. The case is ongoing.
• The incident highlights continuing concerns about the impacts of the tar sands industry on human health and the environment. Experts say government and industry plans for tailing pond cleanup and landscape restoration are far behind schedule, with no viable options now on the table to deal with the fast-growing volume of stored toxic wastewater.

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.

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