A dire warning from a broken pipe

For ages, about the only inhabitants of a secluded stretch of marshland outside this Lubicon Cree community were beavers and ducks. A kilometre deep in the bush from the nearest dirt road, the boggy area was visited by the occasional aboriginal trapper.

Now it’s the site of what looks like a macabre sort of carnival. Brightly coloured plastic flags stretch across a 150-metre expanse to keep birds away. Heavy trucks lumber along makeshift roads. Hundreds of workers, many wearing coveralls, goggles and breathing through masks, toil in the marsh in a desperate effort to bring it back to life.

A thick black coating covers the water and the walls of an old beaver dam, while the pungent smell of oil hangs in the air.

It’s this marsh that caught nearly all of the estimated 28,000 barrels of light crude oil that spilled from Plains Midstream Canada’s 45-year-old Rainbow pipeline on April 28. The oil ran 850 metres downhill and formed a pitch-black hockey stick-shaped pool in the northern muskeg.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/prairies/a-dire-warning-from-a-broken-pipe/article2021897/

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