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Keepers of the Athabasca seek to showcase river health

The Keepers of the Athabasca are fundraising for a new tool to highlight how industrial tailings ponds have affected the quality of Athabasca River water.
2018-7-18-JQ-Athabasca River Report-web-1 copy
The Keepers of the Athabasca seek to create a new tool showcasing data on the quality of Athabasca River water.

The Keepers of the Athabasca are fundraising for a new tool to highlight how industrial tailings ponds have affected the quality of Athabasca River water.

The environmental group is working on a $125,000 data visualization tool, which will highlight public data on surface and ground water quality at four points along the river, according to executive director Jule Asterisk. The project would feature a publicly available online map, including information on the levels of different contaminants in the river and how it compares against drinkable water.

Asterisk said the project aims to help empower communities with information to use in their own water-monitoring programs.

"It's really important to solve the environmental and human health issues that we are facing here in Alberta that have been studiously ignored for decades," Asterisk said in an interview. "It's just not well acknowledged. We need to somehow get some realistic work and I think that the communities hold the keys."

The project began after Gilles Wendling of GW Solutions presented to the Keepers of Athabasca at its annual general meeting held June 1-3, Asterisk said. His consulting firm specializes in hydrology and has implemented similar version of the tools in British Columbia.

Wendling said the tool is a way to simplify a lot of water data to make it more accessible to people without technical expertise.

"In the past, when you looked at complex series of data, it's like going through a binder and you have to flip through pages," Wendling said. "Now what we have, we have everything on one page."

The tool allows people to easily highlight trends and compare the river water against water quality standards, such water as being safe to drink or being safe for fish, Wendling said.

"Very, very quickly, you can visualize trends," he said. "Even people without technical experience they can see if a curve is going up."

The tool uses publicly available data gathered from studies along the Athabasca River, Asterisk said. The group plans to focus on four to be determined areas near tailings ponds - basins with a mixture of residual bitumen used in oil production facilities along the river.

The tailings ponds have been a source of scrutiny from the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, the environmental arm of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which has dealt with submissions that Canada is not enforcing its environmental law with respect to the ponds.

Asterisk said the group plans to hold a community meeting to decide what areas of the river the tool will focus on.

"We just want to touch base and make sure than when the project is being developed, that it is being developed as a tool that communities can actually use with the locations that they're actually concerned about," Asterisk said.

The group has applied for various grants to fund the initiative, Asterisk said. The group has received a $30,000 grant from the Alberta Ecotrust Foundation, but must complete the project within a year as of October to receive the funding. The group is also looking to partner with an academic institution for the project, she added.

The Keepers of Athabasca hope for more funding to be available for environmental monitoring, she said.

"What we're seeing is a lot more communities are very, very interested in environmental monitoring and taking care of the water, taking care of the land," Asterisk said. "We hope that more funding becomes available for communities to do this, because that's what the water and the land needs at this point."

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