Alberta oil sands fire forces mass evacuation of facility

October 19, 2007 by Walter Schneider.

Canadian Occupational Health & Safety News
October 15, 2007

Alberta oil sands fire forces mass evacuation of facility

FORT MCMURRAY (Canadian OH&S News) — More than a thousand workers from an Alberta-based energy company were sent home following an early morning oil sands fire at a facility 25 kilometres north of Fort McMurray earlier this month.

The fire began in a drum of Suncor Energy Inc’s Millennium Coker Unit (a key processing unit in an oil sands upgrader) at around 6 am on October 2, states a press release issued by the Alberta Energy and Utilities Board (EUB). It took approximately 45 minutes to extinguish the fire, adds Josh Stewart, spokesman for Alberta Environment…. (Full Story)

[Update by folc.ca - 2007 11 08: The link no longer functions. Moreover, the website of OHSCanada contains not a single reference to Suncor, a fire at Suncor or any evacuations there that can be accessed through either an Internet search or through OHS’ search facility at their website. That is outright Orwellian editing of recorded history.

Fortunately, the full article from which the quoted paragraphs were excerpted is still available on the Internet at a few other websites that, unlike the OHS article, are fully archived at the Internet Archive.

Unlike the recorded history of the society that George Orwell wrote about in “1984“, any incident thought worth recording by anyone is impossible to erase now, for as long as total control and censorship of the Internet is not handed over to our governments.]

Stories and comments on Suncor coker fire

Comment by folc.ca: Why should anyone in Lamont County care about the Suncor fire?

The Suncor site is 25 km away from Fort McMurray. The Oct. 2 Suncor fire caused the evacuation of more than a thousand workers. How many thousands of people would have had to be evacuated if the fire would not have been 25 km but only two 2 km away from Fort McMurray, the distance between Bruderheim and the proposed HAZCO waste-sulphur storage and handling site?

The evacuation zone identified in the emergency response measures proposed by HAZCO includes neither Bruderheim nor Lamont. Its boundaries extend no farther than 1.5 km away from the proposed HAZCO site.

HAZCO insists that explosions and fires involving sulphur fires and the release of massive volumes of sulphur dioxide produced by such fires are not a threat to the residents of Lamont County. However, as the record of such incidents at http://folc.ca shows, and as is also shown in the category Explosions and Fires at this blog, sulphur fires and even sulphur-storage, -forming and -handling fires happen, happen frequently and happen even in Alberta. Such fires caused evacuations, and at times loss of health and of lives for miles around.

HAZCOS’ proposed sulphur-forming and -shipping facility must not be permitted to be constructed in a location close to areas with high population density. That still leaves the question as to whether the risk of having such a facility is tolerable even in areas with low population density.

Is the acceptance of risk to health and lives a calculated one and a matter of degree? If so, then how many lives constitute too many lives?

The location of Shell’s Shantz sulphur-storage, -forming and -shipping facility was picked because it is more than 40km away from the Natural Gas processing and desulphurization facility at Caroline, so as to remove the risk to Caroline residents that sulphur-storage, -forming and -shipping poses.

If a 40km distance between a sulphur facility and the residents of nearby communities was deemed safe then, how come that HAZCO now insists on lowering that standard to a small fraction (2km) of what it was when a permit was granted for the construction of Shell’s Shantz facility?

In case you wonder about whose sulphur will be handled by HAZCO, the majority, if not all, of that sulphur is being, and will be, produced and owned by Shell.

Posted in Explosions & Fires, Community & Industry, Emission Incidents & Issues, Hazco, Sulphur Logistics, Sulphur-Dioxide | Print | No Comments »