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Oil sands workers pay tragic price on road Six workers killed, many others critically injured in accident; half a billion will be spent on highway projects over 10 years Gary Park Petroleum News Canadian Correspondent
The timing could scarcely have been more painful or poignant.
Just days after the Alberta government set in motion plans to answer a growing clamor for improved infrastructure to meet oil sands needs a road accident north of Edmonton took the lives of six oil sands workers and critically injured many others.
Faced with an C$80 billion pending spree on oil sands development over the next decade, which will spawn greater demands on an already overloaded infrastructure, the Alberta government is taking a more comprehensive and coordinated approach to meeting the sector’s needs.
The expected pressures are reflected in a new study by the Petroleum Human Resources Council of Canada, which estimates that the operations, maintenance and technical engineering sectors of the oil sands will open up 7,198 jobs in the next decade.
Answering this gusher of jobs, Energy Minister Greg Melchin has promised to deliver a detailed strategy by next fall for tackling growing social and infrastructure needs in the oil sands region.
He said the government has decided to “plan on a coordinated regional basis rather than project by project.”
Because of the surge in demand, Melchin said there could be earlier action to ensure land for housing and a new water treatment plant are available in Fort McMurray, the “oil sands capital.”
Meanwhile, a new cabinet committee, drawn from virtually all provincial government departments, has been assigned the job of developing a streamlined, single-window regulatory structure. Cost of long-terms needs not yet known But the cost of meeting the long-term needs won’t be known until the strategy has been developed.
One preliminary indication of what the government is facing came earlier this month when Transportation Minister Lyle Oberg announced that C$530 million will be spent over the next 10 years on highway projects in northeastern Alberta, starting with C$41 million this year.
“These highway improvements are needed to support rapid economic activity and are in line with what industry has said is needed,” he said.
Rightly or wrongly, the state of highways is being partly blamed for the horror that occurred at midnight on May 19.
A single-vehicle accident on a two-lane road about 25 miles north of Edmonton had tied up traffic including a chartered bus carrying 43 contract workers from the giant Syncrude Canada consortium.
Witnesses say the bus driver was persuaded to try turning around to seek an alternative route to Edmonton when the bus became stuck.
About half of the passengers had disembarked when a tractor-trailer unit traveling at speed slammed into the bus.
Some on the bus were killed, others died when they were pinned under the vehicle.
In the immediate aftermath, the government was criticized for not taking measures to twin the highway because of the rapidly rising traffic volumes, but officials say traffic counts are still well short of the threshold to qualify for spending on a divided highway.
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