Halting the Tar Sands 'Heavy Haul'
Coming soon to the roads of the Northwest: loads of mining equipment shipped from Korea to Alberta. Each load up to 24 feet wide, 30 feet tall and 160 feet in length- about the size of the Statue of Liberty on its side. A fifty year projected project, the first “heavy haul” is slated for sometime later in 2010 or 2011, with 207 shipments planned for the first round. Harry Lillo of Imperial Oil/Exxon Mobil said he hopes the novelty of the huge loads will wear off quickly. "We're hoping about the time the fourth of fifth one goes by, people are going to say, 'Oh, there goes another one,'" he said. That is pretty unlikely.
Since there is a projected 4.6 billion barrels of oil up in the tar sands, what the oil companies are billing as a brief interlude of travel inconvenience, is likely to continue indefinitely and incur possible casualties as drivers attempt this unpredictable haul. Exxon-Mobil (through Imperial Oil) is proposing to pay to the state of Montana to make the roads “worthy” of the big trucks.
The saga begins in South Korea, where very special mining equipment is made, and barged across to the Ports of Portland and Vancouver. The massive truck shipments will be traveling from the Port of Portland, up the Columbia and Snake rivers to Lewiston, Idaho. There they will be loaded onto special trailers for their trek over Lolo Pass into Montana and then north into Canada.
According to Bruce Brockmann of Fluor Corp., which is engineering the transportation plan, the trucks will move at a maximum speed of 30 mph on the flat and at 5 mph around corners and down hills. Two-lane roads must be closed in both directions when the trucks are moving and state law doesn't allow delays to last longer than 10 minutes. The plan calls for dozens of turnouts, some of which the oil company will build.
A practice run is planned for mid-2010 using a truck configuration that represents the largest of the anticipated loads. The practice run truck is the size of a dozen semis — two long, two high and three wide. The largest trucks will have 12 rows of axles with eight tires per axle.
As of 2009, there had been only four trucks of almost comparable size on American highways. Those trucks averaged 130,000 pounds and traveled a total of around 78 miles. The heavy haul loads are each twice that big, and will travel almost 1000 miles. Each load is up to 150 tons or more, with up to 24 axles. Highways, most of which are two lane on the proposed route, are not engineered to sustain these loads. The maximum loads discussed in most state Department of Transportation regulations are 15 tons. The Federal Department of Transportation provides for loads up to 80,000 pounds on the interstate highway system. The heavy haul loads are almost four times that size weighing in at 300,000 pounds. Within a short time, the roads will have to be reconstructed. These roads will provide the pathway to the most destructive project on the planet - the tar sands.
The Athabascan tar sands are the largest industrial project in human history, requiring mass amounts of energy, money and infrastructure. In their wake, they lay to waste hundreds of thousands of acres of pristine boreal forest, killing a multitude of birds, grizzly bears, and contaminating one of the largest watersheds in North America- the Athabascan river system. All the while, the Dene, Mikisew Cree and other Indigenous communities of the north are being devastated by new forms of cancer and other disease. The communities have been overrun by industrial machinery and workers who follow the oil and greed of corporations like ExxonMobil, Imperial Oil, Sunoco and others. As we watch the devastation to the south in the Gulf of Mexico, we look to the north and find the same level of destruction. In short, we are drowning in oil.
The project is grossly inefficient and is solely about profit. Daily, tar sands producers burn 600 million cubic feet of natural gas to produce tar sands oil, enough natural gas to heat three million homes. The carbon emissions for the project surpass those of 97 nations in the world combined. The oil from the tar sands is being pumped through pipelines to American consumers and new pipelines are underway. And, at every link in the pipeline, communities are working to oppose the project.
With some 4.6 billion barrels of bitumen in the boreal forest of Dene and Cree people, the project is considered an alternative to dependence on Saudi Arabia and foreign imports.
This level of destruction requires infrastructure- in fact, it requires mass amounts of infrastructure which is not yet here. For this reason, oil giants are working to receive state approvals to ship monstrous modules of mining equipment from Korea to ports in Portland and Vancouver, Washington, loaded onto gigantic specialized trucks and driven to Alberta, Canada. In order for this machinery to get to the tar sands, they have to go through our cities, our towns, our rivers and our roads, and all this means we have a chance to stop the heavy haul.
Photo Credit: DOT Montana
