Didn't conservatives say oil sands were safe, cheap and clean ways of getting energy?

[Legion Troll]

A fire fueled by shifting winds that forced more than 80,000 people to flee their homes and threatened the business district of oil-sands hub Fort McMurray, Canada, raged out of control Wednesday after consuming 80 square kilometers (30 square miles) of land and damaging 1,600 buildings.

Suncor Energy Inc. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc are among companies reducing production and opening up work camps to residents fleeing blazes across northern Alberta, amid the province’s biggest-ever evacuation caused by a fire. No deaths or injuries have been reported.

Many residents fled north to nearby oil-sands sites, where companies are flying out workers and making room for evacuees. Shell has shut its 255,000 barrel-a-day Albian Sands mine and Suncor, Syncrude Canada Ltd. and Connacher Oil and Gas Ltd. have also reduced output from the region, the companies said.

“My house and everything I own is gone,” Mike Marchand, a crane operator for Suncor, said in a phone interview from Edmonton, where he evacuated with his family after the trailer park where he lives in Fort McMurray went up in flames. “I’ve never had anything like this happen.”

The wildfire is the latest blow to a province already grappling with the economic toll of a two-year oil price slump in one of the world’s most expensive places to extract crude. More than 40,000 energy jobs have been lost in Canada since the price crash began in 2014. Some 250 firefighters, 10 helicopters and 17 air tankers have been deployed to fight the blazes around Fort McMurray, about 700 kilometers northeast of Calgary.

In the hardest-hit Fort McMurray neighborhoods, between 50 percent and 90 percent of homes have been lost, officials said Wednesday.



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-03/alberta-fires-force-evacuation-at-center-of-oil-sands-region

 

[TheDonald]

Oil sands are safe, they are as clean as the burner that burns them. So you prefer to import energy from terrorist states, why?

 

[Legion Troll]

On her frantic escape by car from Fort McMurray, Mary Thomas watched in horror as town landmarks like the Super 8 hotel and the newly-opened Denny’s restaurant were swallowed up in a fire that’s engulfed the Canadian oil town.

“I couldn’t control my tears,” said Thomas, 46, who fled the flames with her husband and two children. She was unsure of the status of her house. “It’s so hard to imagine how we’ll move on.”

Thomas is among the more than 80,000 people who were forced to flee their homes as fires tore through her northern Alberta community, reducing entire neighborhoods to ash.

The former northern Alberta boom town has been grappling with an oil market downturn approaching two years that put thousands of residents out of work and caused property values to plummet. Now those who’ve lost houses and workplaces are weighing how many will still call the place home after the fire burns out. With the town evacuated, residents are left to ponder what will be left standing as the fire continues to rage.

The former boom town that was bursting at the seams just a few years ago dealing with a massive influx of oil sands workers, is now in tatters.



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-05/-fire-refugees-flee-alberta-town-with-flames-lapping-at-wheels

 

[Callinectes]

It's a WILDFIRE, no oil facilities are even in it's path. That picture is Kuwait in 1991.

 

[Legion Troll]

Alberta oil facilities remain under fire threat​

 

[Callinectes]

Alberta oil facilities remain under fire threat​

Your news is newer than mine, but okay.
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/En...ities-remain-under-fire-threat/6021462442740/
Article says oil facilities are "in safe condition", whatever that means.

 

[canceled.2021.1]

A fire fueled by shifting winds that forced more than 80,000 people to flee their homes and threatened the business district of oil-sands hub Fort McMurray, Canada, raged out of control Wednesday after consuming 80 square kilometers (30 square miles) of land and damaging 1,600 buildings.

Suncor Energy Inc. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc are among companies reducing production and opening up work camps to residents fleeing blazes across northern Alberta, amid the province’s biggest-ever evacuation caused by a fire. No deaths or injuries have been reported.

Many residents fled north to nearby oil-sands sites, where companies are flying out workers and making room for evacuees. Shell has shut its 255,000 barrel-a-day Albian Sands mine and Suncor, Syncrude Canada Ltd. and Connacher Oil and Gas Ltd. have also reduced output from the region, the companies said.

“My house and everything I own is gone,” Mike Marchand, a crane operator for Suncor, said in a phone interview from Edmonton, where he evacuated with his family after the trailer park where he lives in Fort McMurray went up in flames. “I’ve never had anything like this happen.”

The wildfire is the latest blow to a province already grappling with the economic toll of a two-year oil price slump in one of the world’s most expensive places to extract crude. More than 40,000 energy jobs have been lost in Canada since the price crash began in 2014. Some 250 firefighters, 10 helicopters and 17 air tankers have been deployed to fight the blazes around Fort McMurray, about 700 kilometers northeast of Calgary.

In the hardest-hit Fort McMurray neighborhoods, between 50 percent and 90 percent of homes have been lost, officials said Wednesday.



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-03/alberta-fires-force-evacuation-at-center-of-oil-sands-region

Who said that?

 

[Legion Troll]

Fires are a constant occupational threat in the oil business, and oil sands are no different.

In their natural state, oil sands themselves aren’t particularly flammable. Bitumen has the consistency of molasses at room temperature, and is mixed with sand, making it burn at a slower pace if ignited (plus, 80 per cent of it is buried deep underground).

The same can’t be said of all the equipment and chemical processes used to extract and upgrade that bitumen into synthetic crude oil.

Companies that mine and upgrade oil sands bitumen rely on massive pieces of machinery, high temperatures and high pressures to do the dirty work—producing fuels and feedstock.

The U.S. National Fire Protection Association Journal offered a list of the fire risks faced by Suncor Energy, one of the oil sands’ biggest producers. It included: “hydrocarbon spill and pressure fires; storage tank fires; vapor cloud explosions; flammable gas fires; runaway exothermic reactions; and coke and sulfur fires.” The list continued: “natural gas- and coke-fired electricity/steam generating plants; a large fleet of mining equipment; ore-processing and oil extraction plants; multi-story office buildings; fleets of tank trucks carrying combustible and hazardous commodities; and the wildlands and boreal forests that surround the facility.”

Those soupy, bird-killing tailing ponds? They’re not flammable. They may well be the only thing about an oil sands operation that isn’t.



http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/could-the-oil-sands-catch-fire/

 

[Legion Troll]

You don't have to put up with it if you have them both on ignore like I do. Doesn't stop one of from begging for my attention. But, those are his daddy issues.

Legion is very needy that is why you will see him chase me around the board responding to my every post even though I no longer engage his nonsense. For some reason he is desperate for my attention.

Who said that?

 

[Legion Troll]

Article says oil facilities are "in safe condition", whatever that means.

Oil companies never lie....do they?

The fire raging through the Canadian province of Alberta has grown into a behemoth blaze that has consumed an area bigger than New York City.

Alberta officials warned Thursday that the inferno, which forced the evacuation of the city of Fort McMurray, could grow even larger.

While more than 1,000 firefighters frantically battled the blaze, officials declared a state of emergency across the entire province of Alberta.

Ryan Cox said he had just 45 minutes to pack a bag and get his wife Amanda and 2-year-old son Malcolm out of their townhouse.

"By the time we had gotten everything together, that was when the evacuation notice came," said Cox, now bunking in a hotel in Edmonton, some 280 miles south of the the fires. "Then when we had to drive through the valley I blew a tire, so I gunned it with a flat through downtown."

With the flames just 200 feet away, Cox said he pulled over his 2007 Ford Focus to change the tire — something he had never done before.

Luckily, said Cox, another motorist helped him and soon they found themselves fleeing through a frightening landscape.



It's a good thing that "other motorist" wasn't a Christian, like the tow truck driver who left a disabled motorist stranded because they had a Bernie sticker on their car, isn't it?


Meanwhile, Fort McMurray burned and the "heartbreaking" blaze spread to the oil camps outside of town, forcing the refugees who had sought shelter there to once again cut and run.


http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/fort-mcmurray-wildfire-more-evacuated-blaze-spreads-south-n568476