Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Uh, true?
True. The top slice is overburden, oil sand is the gooey filling, and the bottom slice is
limestone. Yummy!
I no longer had the lab to myself. An elderly couple had entered and, after a cursory
look at the shovels, were now having a go at
PUMP IT.
I turned back to
GUESS IT.
Who is responsible for protecting the environment? a) the government, b) the oil sands
companies, c) everyone.
It was that defensive tone. I didn't need to turn the panel to know what
GUESS IT
wanted me to say. The only question was whether children were really the Play Lab's target
audience after all.
The highway north of Fort McMurray is so small, relative to the thousands of workers who
need to get to the work sites every day, that traffic can be terrible, especially during shift
changes. So the oil sands companies hire buses to ferry workers to and from town. Ubi-
quitous red and white Diversified Transportation coaches ply the highway in pods. That an
industry partly responsible for Canada blowing its emission-reduction goals has a thriving
rideshare program is just one of the tidy, spring-loaded ironies that jump out at you here.
The Suncor bus tour leaves from in front of the OSDC—I stole in for a quick taste of the
Dig and Sniff—and it employs one of those same Diversified buses, re-tasked for our tour-
istic needs. Mindy, our perky young tour guide, popped up in front and asked us to buckle
our seat belts. “Safety,” she said, “is one of our number-one priorities.” The driver gunned
the engine and we were off, about to be taken, Universal Studios-style, through an open
wound on the world's single largest deposit of petroleum. What soaring cliffs and hulking
machinery did the day hold for us?
The bus was nearly full, mostly with families and seniors—people who looked like they
had seen the inside of a few tour buses. A quartet of old ladies giggled like they were on a
Saturday-night joyride. Sitting next to me was a Mr. Ganapathi, an old Indian man with a
single, twisting tooth jutting from his lower jaw.
“You are married?” he asked.
I wasn't, I said. But I thought of the Doctor. It wasn't a bad idea.
By now we were passing along the eastern edge of the large tailings pond in front of
Syncrude.
“Is this where all those ducks got killed?” a man asked his wife.
