A culture of silence
‘There’s no sense in speaking up, because nothing you do will ever change anything’
Finding people in Saskatchewan with stories about alarming encounters with hydrogen sulphide isn’t hard.
A investigation involving journalists at the Toronto Star, the National Observer, Global News and journalism schools at Regina, Concordia, Ryerson and the University of British Columbia found many residents and oil industry workers with concerns about the potentially deadly gas floating over Saskatchewan.
Finding people willing to tell those stories is nearly impossible.
There is a culture of secrecy fuelled by oil industry money, the province’s reliance on that money and the threats that have followed those who have spoken out.
The industry dominates the province’s landscape and economy with about 58,000 active wells extracting oil and gas worth more than $6.9 billion last year. Nearly every family in the province’s towns and First Nations reserves has some form of connection to the industry.
Social ties are tight. And criticism of the industry can upset neighbours, family and local businesses.
One couple who had worked in the industry said they had each been sickened by H2S near their home in the southeast of the province. They met reporters several times but refused to be named.
If anyone learned of the meetings, word would spread, the husband said, and he would be blackballed and unable to find work.
“There’s nothing going to change,” his wife said. “There’s no sense in speaking up, because nothing you do will ever change anything.”
The few who have publicly raised concerns about spills in their fields, water being fouled, sacred sites defiled, or gas emissions wafting into their yards told of losing clients, neighbours who stopped speaking to them, jobs lost and other methods of intimidation.
“People are afraid because, well, (oil companies) have a lot of money, they own everything, and there’s always that promise of bringing in money and with money, you know, hope,” says Marilyn Wapass of Thunderchild First Nation, a west-central Saskatchewan community that has welcomed oil development.
Wapass launched a protest when seismic testing — which involved explosive charges — was conducted next to the community’s sundance grounds. She ended up getting arrested for trying to stand in the way.
“Only a handful of people have actually come forward and have stood by me and continue to stand with me. For the rest of the people, they’ve just, kind of turned their backs on me,” she says. “It’s been a very lonely place to stand.” Shunning can turn into outright intimidation. Workers from a local drilling company “were driving down our road, then turning around and shining their lights on our house,” says Shirley Galloway, a nurse and oilfield safety expert who has voiced concerns about H2S plumes around Oxbow.
The harassment, for a time, was consistent and “creepy,” says her husband, Jim.
“They would shine the lights, turn around, shine the lights back in the house and then slowly creep by the house.”
Emil Bell, a member of Canoe Lake Cree First Nation, went on a hunger strike after Husky Oil spilled an estimated 225,000 litres of heavy crude and chemical diluent into the North Saskatchewan River in July 2016. “Even in my own community, people don’t want to hang around me because if they are employed by the reserve, they can lose their job because they’re associating with me.”
Many believe they cannot rely on government regulators to help them and they are left to negotiate with oil company representatives themselves.
The ministry “prefers to see operators deal with public complaints without having to be involved,” read the minutes of a government/industry meeting held May 28, 2015.
There is often no information on complaints involving H2S, or those injured by it, available to the public.
A freedom-of-information request to the Ministry of Economy, which regulates the industry, for copies of public complaints was returned stating “no such records exist,” although reporters had copies of emails residents had sent to the government.
Even when incidents are reported, the government’s database is often so incomplete and opaque that serious incidents are almost unrecognizable.
For example, an incident report from Dec. 22, 2015, contains a dry, four-sentence summary of an equipment failure in the southeast when H2S gas was vented.
A company report on the incident — obtained through a freedom-of-information request — recounts an alarming version of events. The gas cloud drifted a half-kilometre, in an area with roads, fields and the occasional farm, before enveloping three workers at a gas plant.
Four workers were notified by radio of a gas leak and told to evacuate immediately. While alarms sounded, two ran toward the main control room as their personal H2S monitors were going off; the third also tried to evacuate, the document reads.
A fourth hit the “emergency shut down” button and grabbed a breathing apparatus before checking on the others.
Three workers were “effected [sic] by H2S with one worker losing consciousness.”
The company report concludes that the well suffered a “catastrophic” failure, leading to a “high concentration of H2S being emitted to the atmosphere.” None of that information was made public. Lori Erhardt, a United Church minister in Oxbow, suffers from breathing problems and must sometimes rely on supplemental oxygen.
In 2012, she was forced to leave her home for 17 months to escape what she believes was constant exposure to toxic emissions.
“I’ll be driving . . . and all of a sudden my voice just goes — and this has happened for several years — and then I’ll feel this tightness in my chest,” she says. “I’d land in the hospital about every year . . . You feel a bit like a canary in a flare zone.”
When she had tried to file complaints, she says regional officials seemed “helpless” to take action: “The response was usually, ‘Well, you know, we’re monitoring it.’ ”
She was instructed to contact people higher up in government, but decided to leave Oxbow instead. “I was so sick,” she says, “I just couldn’t do it.”
After Shirley Galloway sent complaints to contractors about facilities operated by a local company, the company sent her a registered letter asking her to cease communications with the contractors or face legal action. It ended: “Please govern yourself accordingly.”
If something goes wrong, “if there’s any kind of release or gas, we have nobody to call,” says Galloway.
The culture of silence is the result of industry holding rural communities “hostage,” says Emily Eaton, a professor at the University of Regina who has studied the impacts of the industry on rural residents for several years, recently as a member of the Corporate Mapping Project.
“Certainly (industry) does provide benefits. No one can deny that there are a lot of jobs produced by industry in rural areas,” she says, “but those come along with an expectation that you’ll remain silent about the types of impacts that you might be experiencing in your backyard.
“The culture of silence in Saskatchewan is really a culture of fear.”
PATTI SONNTAG MICHENER FOUNDATION ROBERT CRIBB TORONTO STAR P.W. ELLIOTT UNIVERSITY OF REGINA