Oil spill fouled water, disrupted lives
We look back a year after pipeline leak in North Saskatchewan River
Sometime before midnight on July 20, 2016, a Husky Energy Inc. pipeline crossing the North Saskatchewan River failed, dumping thousands of litres of crude near and into the vital waterway.
The response was unprecedented. Downstream cities scrambled to protect their water sources and more than $100 million was dedicated to clean up efforts — work that is still ongoing.
To mark the first anniversary of the spill, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix spoke with people who were there when it happened and played a role, large or small, last summer.
THE FARMERS
The first thing John Green noticed was the traffic. At first, he didn’t know what to make of the long procession of trucks, buses and heavy equipment rolling past his farm northeast of Lloydminster, on the banks of the North Saskatchewan.
Then the phone rang. Green’s wife Leonie picked it up and spoke with a Husky Energy employee, who explained that a 16-inch pipeline had failed and was leaking heavy crude about a kilometre and a half north of the farmyard.
“I didn’t go down, but one of the boys went down and there was a little bit of oil on the river there,” the 72-year-old farmer recalled almost exactly a year after the Calgary-based company’s pipeline failed.
The company has said the failure was caused by ground movement.
A few days after the spill was discovered, as communities downstream scrambled to establish alternative sources of drinking water, boats floated on the river while semi-trucks, bobcats and backhoes continued to roll past the Green family farm.
“They’re hauling everything away and they’re going to replace it, they’re going to do better,” Leonie Green said on July 26. “I have more concerns for other people, people down the line.”
Today, there is little evidence at the scene to suggest a spill took place. The pipeline was shut down around 10 a.m. that day and has not been restarted. The work crews have long since moved on to other projects. The morning air is quiet again.
“It was pretty hectic there for awhile,” John Green recalls with a wry laugh.
THE MAYOR
Almost 300 kilometres downstream, Greg Dionne was at home in Prince Albert when he heard something had happened on the North Saskatchewan. His first instinct, he recalled in an interview this week, was to pay no attention to it — but that didn’t last.
“The next morning, I got an urgent call: Come to City Hall,” said Dionne, who was elected mayor of the city of 35,000 people in 2012 and re-elected last October.
“It was very clear that we were going to have to get out of the river. You sit there and you go, ‘Oh my God.’ It takes a little while to sink in. ‘What do you mean we’ve got to find another source of water? We have the river.’ ”
It took three days for the plume of heavy oil to reach North Battleford, which closed its water treatment plant’s river intakes on July 23. Two days later, with the slick moving inexorably east, Prince Albert did the same.
By that point, Dionne — who occasionally slept in his office during the crisis — along with city manager Jim Toye and fire chief Jason Everitt had established plans to feed the city with a 30-kilometre pipeline to the South Saskatchewan River.
Although it required that some rural municipalities, as well as the Saskatchewan Penitentiary, to be cut off from city water, the pipeline worked remarkably well, Dionne said. Eventually, a second pipeline to the Little Red River was established.
Today, Dionne has nothing but praise for city staff and the dozens of communities and organizations that offered to help. He said new filters at the water treatment plant mean similar measures will likely never be needed again.
“I always took it for granted,” he said of the river. “I won’t do that again.”
THE ACTIVIST
Emil Bell was driving to his home near Canoe Lake from Lloydminster with a load of solar panels — “I got a good deal,” he recalls with a laugh — when he heard about oil gushing into the river. Not long afterward, he decided to stop eating in protest.
“One of the things that we noticed right away was there was no reaction whatsoever from people,” Bell said in an interview this week. “And then I figured, ‘Oh hell, we might as well get something going.’ ”
On Aug. 5, Bell moved into a teepee on a picturesque farm near Duck Lake owned by his friend Tyrone Tootoosis, a prominent chronicler of Indigenous culture and community leader. Tootoosis died in February, about two years after a “grim” health diagnosis.
Over the next seven days, Bell endured, drinking only water, beneath an upside down Saskatchewan flag. On Aug. 22, 10 days after health concerns forced him to end the strike, more than a dozen activists and environmentalists descended on the farm.
That meeting led to the formation of the Kisiskatchewan Water Alliance Network, is aimed at combating what Tootoosis dubbed “apathetic complacency” and guaranteeing the safety of the province’s vital water supplies.
“It takes a long time to wake people up,” Bell conceded this week before pointing to other, similar protests, such as the anti-Dakota Access Pipeline efforts near Standing Rock, South Dakota as examples of how change is still happening.
Bell, a member of Canoe Lake Cree First Nation who was 75 years old when he launched his hunger strike, said he has not stopped pushing for change. He said he would do it all again if necessary — but he hopes it won’t be.
“I think a lot of people started believing in what we were saying, that we have to change the tide of where we’re going.”
THE SCIENTIST
Sylvia McAdam remembers watching Ricardo Segovia and his colleagues don protective gear, including masks, before collecting water samples from the most heavily contaminated parts of the North Saskatchewan River last August.
“I was shocked,” admitted the Idle No More co-founder, explaining that the E-Tech International scientist cautioned her and other bystanders to stay at least 10 feet away from the oil slicks coating the riverbank near the spill site.
Segovia was commissioned by several grassroots organizations, including Idle No More, to study the effects of the spill. McAdam said she and others decided an independent study was needed because “official” communications were problematic.
“It’s incredibly important,” McAdam said of the decision, which led to a report released in September that took issue with claims by Husky and the provincial government that the spill began on July 21 and that most of the oil had been recovered.
In the weeks that followed, Segovia, who could not be reached for comment this week, emerged as one of the loudest critics of the official narrative, arguing that his evidence suggested the pipeline leaked for at least 14 hours before its discovery.
Husky said initially that it detected the leak around 8 p.m. on July 20, but later stated that the breach was discovered 14 hours later. Government investigators admitted in March that it began late on July 20.
Segovia has also warned that oil embedded deep within the sediments on the bottom of the river could pose health risks for years to come. McAdam said this week that his report tells a much more important lesson.
“We’re always lulled as community members to believe that government and all these different organizations are doing things in our best interest,” she said. “And yet, time and time again, it’s been demonstrated that’s not necessarily the case.”
THE SPOKESMAN
Wes Kotyk was in a meeting when his iPhone started beeping on the morning of July 21. By the following morning, the 25-year Ministry of Environment veteran had emerged as the provincial government’s main spokesman on the unfolding incident.
In the hours and days after the spill was reported, the government moved swiftly understand what was happening on the river north of Paynton, and then mobilize workers, said Kotyk, who runs the ministry’s environmental protection branch.
“As soon as we were made aware on our end, we knew it was something that we needed to get on as soon as possible,” Kotyk said, adding that communication ultimately proved to be a much greater challenge than actually cleaning up the spill.
In the weeks and months that followed, the provincial government raced to introduce new measures designed to improve pipeline safety. At the same time, it was repeatedly blasted by the provincial auditor on its failure to do so previously.
Kotyk said the government learned important lessons last summer and fall, especially when it came to the establishment of emergency command structures and keeping information flowing between departments and on to the people affected.
“I think that the work has been taken to be able to minimize future events from occurring (and) I think what this demonstrated is that there are processes in place that, when the incidents occur, we can quickly respond.”
One year has passed since the spill, but its effects continue to linger. According to the provincial government, Husky crews identified about 6.5 kilometres of riverbank in need of further cleaning. The company says it has improved its operations as well as its relationships with communities where it operates, but could still face millions of dollars in fines.