N.W.T. says lack of notice on Kearl oilsands tailings spill goes against deal with Alberta

Alberta didn’t live up to the terms of a deal it has with the Northwest Territories to inform it about threats to its shared watershed after two major oilsands tailings spills, the territory’s environment minister said Friday.

Shane Thompson said the lack of communication isn’t encouraging as Alberta and the federal government work out the terms under which tailings will be treated and released into the Athabasca River.

“The bilateral agreement says Alberta is supposed to advise us with any ecological changes that happen and they didn’t do that,” he said.

“This event underlines our position. The government of the N.W.T. will not support the release of tailings unless rigorous science shows how to do it.

“We also need to see the science.”

Employees at Imperial Oil’s Kearl Lake oilsands facility first reported seepage from a tailings pond last May to the Alberta Energy Regulator.

A second release of at least 5.3 million litres of wastewater was reported in early February from a storage pond. That makes it, on its own, one of the largest spills in Alberta history.

The tailings leaked onto muskeg and forest as well as a small lake and tributaries of the Firebag and Muskeg rivers.

The wastewater exceeds federal and provincial guidelines for iron, arsenic, sulphates and hydrocarbons that could include kerosene, creosote and diesel.

The seepage, the amount of which hasn’t been estimated, continues.

Thompson said his government was never officially notified about the spill, despite the 2015 legally binding Mackenzie Basin Bilateral Water Management agreement with Alberta.

That agreement emphasizes several times the importance of mutual and prompt notification of changes on the watershed, including during an emergency.

“The protocols will ensure that the party within whose jurisdiction the emergency originates will, without delay, notify the other partner,” it says.

Thompson said he met several times with his Alberta counterpart Sonya Savage — who was previous the province’s energy minister…