Among the reasons for concern:
- An Alberta Health Services study released last February found more instances of cancer than expected in Fort Chipewyan, a community on Athabasca Lake, 260 kilometers downstream from tar sands development. As the CMAJ points out, the study doesn't establish a causal link to any environmental factors, but if I found 30% more cancer in my neighborhood, I'd be looking around for some sort of pollution.
- The Globe and Mail reports that some Fort Chipewyan residents have stopped eating fish and drinking water from the Athabasca River after catching fish with unusual lesions. Eewww.
- Folks downstream are also worried about pollution from leaking tailings ponds. Those ponds are already killing ducks, as reported here last May, and they could kill as many as 160 million migratory birds over the next three decades of development. According to Andrew Nikiforuk, author of Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, the tar sands tailings ponds currently rise 300 feet above ground and cover 80 square miles of what used ot be forest and wetland. Currently that's about 190 billion gallons of sludge chock full of poisonous chemicals. That's enough to cover 912 square miles a foot deep in muck (Lake County is 575 square miles). If I had nothing but leaky dikes between my water supply and that much toxic waste, I'd be nervous, too.