By Shane O'Neill

Contractor concerned by material floating down river

Sep 1, 2016 | 6:07 PM

Water tests from the North Saskatchewan River may show low or no levels of contamination, but it’s what’s floating on top and sinking into the soil, that has contractors and the council of James Smith Cree Nation (JSCN) concerned.

Stephen Neal is the CEO of Canadian Floating Fence Corporation, the company hired by JSCN to assemble booms and collect any material floating down river.

“Seeing dead fish in the water, that bothered me yesterday,” Neal said of his observations this week. “We were at the Wapiti Valley area and we collected a lot of dead animals.”

Neal said determining the exact nature of the effluent recovered is not for him or the company to determine; that will be up to the Water Security Agency and other independent labs tasked with analyzing the samples. For now, he and his team are collecting and removing effluent from the water.

“The oil, it just keeps coming,” Neal said. “When the weather gets a little warm, holy smokes, does it ever rise up out of the river bed.”

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Husky Energy and the Water Security Agency have yet to acknowledge the material collected from the James Smith and Wapiti areas originated from a pipeline which ruptured near Maidstone in July.

Neal and James Smith Band Council want Husky to acknowledge the material they are collecting comes from the Maidstone spill.

“The amount of crayfish that are dying, the amount (of) snails we picked up yesterday, there’s no dragon flies, there’s no water skitters,” Neal said. “It’s just incredible how shocking it is.”

Neal did an independent study of the July, 2010 Enbridge oil spill near Kalamazoo, Michigan, when 1,100,000 litres of diluted bitumen spilled into the Talmadge Creek and the Kalamazoo River. Thirty-five miles of the river was closed for nearly two years for clean-up operations.

While the Kalamazoo leak was larger in scale, Neal studied the containment of the spill and identified a number of shortcomings with traditional booms used in the clean up. The booms used in Kalamazoo are similar to the booms being used up river around Maidstone and the Battlefords. Neal found in his study that the devices tend to fail in fast flowing water, allowing bitumen and effluent to escape and continue travelling down river. He says his company’s booms, which use a mesh material to allow water to pass through, are better suited to capture more material on the water.

“I don’t like the fact we have to rely on Mother Nature to look after the spill,” Neal explained. “There’s many scientific and technological products that can be implemented to reduce the [clean-up] time.”

Sam Ferris, of the Water Security Agency, spoke with media on Thursday. While he was not able to provide a definitive timeline on when water in the North Saskatchewan River could be safely treated by the municipalities of P.A. and the Battlefords, he did say he was confident the intakes could be reopened “certainly before winter comes.”

Neal was less confident in any timeline for the river to be free of contamination.

“The amount of oil that has not been collected yet, based on reports, is close to 100,000 litres unaccounted for,” Neal said. “It will take time, it will be a number of seasons [before the river is back to normal].”

shane.oneill@paNOW.com

On Twitter: @stroneill