‘We don’t know’: Concerns about Wabamun Lake linger 20 years after CN derailment

Concerns linger over the long-term effects of hundreds of thousands of litres of oil and chemicals that spilled into Wabamun Lake 20 years ago.

It’s been 20 years since a major ecological disaster in Alberta.

On Aug. 3, 2005, a CN train derailed, dumping nearly 800,000 litres of bunker oil and wood preservative into Wabamun Lake.

Bill Purdy remembers the day well.

“We found the 15 rail cars that were leaking crude oil, and a number of other cars that were spewing out other hazardous materials,” he told CTV News Edmonton.

Purdy, a former MLA and municipal councillor for the area, was deputy chief of the fire department when the crash happened.

He says his department set up booms to try and contain the spill. It worked at first.

“Unfortunately, about 9 p.m., the wind came up from the northwest and it broke the booms all apart, and the oil started to move east down the lake,” he said.

“The first call I made was to our executive officer of the village, and I said, ‘You better shut the water treatment plant down, because we were getting our source of water out of the lake.’”

Purdy says what followed was an 18-month process to clean up the lake.

CN ultimately paid $90 million for the cleanup and another $40 million in claims.

The company was also ordered to create an emergency response course at NAIT at a cost of $1 million, and ordered to pay a $400,00 fine to go to programs like the Wildlife Rehabilitation Society.

There was some concern after the spill that the lake would never recover.

Nearly a decade after the spill, a report on the environmental health of the lake commissioned by the Wabamun Watershed Management Council (WWMC) showed there were no long-term effects, and the province gave it a clean bill of health.

Twenty years on, opinions about the current state of the water from residents are mixed.

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“I think the state of the lake is excellent,” Purdy said.

“I would draw a conclusion by the amount of traffic and the amount of people that are coming out here. There’s a lot of confidence in this lake.”

Sue Styles of the WWMC is less certain.

“I would say that there are diverse opinions or diverse perspectives about the current state of the spill. There are stakeholders that are content with the current state,” she told CTV News Edmonton.

“There are also perspectives that remain concerned about the impact of the oil spill this many years later, and their concerns are related to the adequacy of the clean up. Their concerns are related to the adequacy of follow up.”

Styles says the lake is primarily fed by precipitation and not by any major rivers.

“The water that is here stays here. And so the residency is a long time. And that, of course, has implications related to the oil spill,” she noted.

Fish were reintroduced back into the waters in the years since the spill, but Styles says more studies are needed to determine the long-term impacts on them.

“There’s certainly a reasonable belief that the oil spill continues to impact the fisheries,” she said.

“The fish index netting studies that the Alberta government does indicate that there is increasing risk to the sustainability of the fish.”

The WWMC has been doing its own work to try and improve the state of the lake for fish.

“We have been doing a bulrush restoration because we know that the bulrush restoration provides fish habitat. It provides good water quality, it also mitigates soil erosion,” Styles said.

“Some of the bulrush and some of the aquatic vegetation was destroyed in the clean up, and so it’s important that we restore that.”

She says water quality tests are being done regularly, but the WWMC can’t afford comprehensive tests.

“We don’t know what the persistence of the residual oil is 20 years later in this context, or in any context. We just don’t have that,” she said.

“Really, we do have a knowledge gap in understanding the current state.”

She says there has been limited interest from the provincial government on doing any follow up studies on the lake.

“Following the clean up that Alberta Environment considered to be complete, there has been no involvement, no participation.”

She says it’s a missed opportunity to clear up any concerns some residents still have to this day.

“One of our Indigenous communities does not consider it safe. They will not allow their families to use the lake in the same way as they did previously,” she said.

CTV News Edmonton has reached out to the government of Alberta for comment.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Amanda Anderson