Oil boom brings progress and problems to city
June 13, 2006 Edition 1
Wojtek Dabrowski
Housing in Canada’s oil town of Fort McMurray is so scarce that some workers live in campers in hotel parking lots, pitch tents on the city’s outskirts or rent garages and toolsheds as homes.
Billboards scream out job offers. Burger King pays US$13 (R87) an hour, or twice the provincial minimum wage, while a Shell petrol station offers new workers the chance to win a vacation. Spiralling salaries lure outsiders with the promise of a good life.
But the oil boom has also brought problems to a city that now has 61 000 residents, up from 34 000 just 10 years ago. Another 9 000 live in work camps that support massive construction projects.
There are an estimated 450 homeless, as would-be workers struggle to find a home, and police have doubled their drugs squad – to six from three – to cope with rising crime.
Last year, Fort McMurray saw 1 232 “persons crimes”, which include murder, assault and sexual assault, up 22.6% from 2004.
“We do have drug problems, we have organised crime, we have street-level prostitution, as do other large urban centres,” said police Superintendent Peter Clark, the town’s top officer.
“When population goes up and people are shoulder-to-shoulder in density situations, conflict increases.”
The boom stems from the kilometre upon kilometre of oil sands just half an hour to the north of Fort McMurray.
The oil sands, also known as tar sands, contain an estimated 174 billion barrels of oil. They are the world’s largest untapped source of oil after Saudi Arabia, although mining this oil is far more costly and more labour intensive than tapping an oil well in the Saudi desert.
Operations are centred for the most part on open-pit mines and massive, steam-belching plants that wrest oil from sand.
Vast shovels load tons of dark sand into house-sized dump trucks with grilles larger than a garage door and a staircase for the driver to get up to the cab.
“They have a tremendous bearing on the community and I think, economically speaking, are one of the best assets that we have,” says Melissa Blake, the mayor of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, which includes Fort McMurray.
Blake, whose neat office overlooks downtown Fort McMurray, has haggled with the Alberta government to release more land for housing, and she says land is coming slowly.
“With rents, what we’ve seen is steady increases ... and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight as to what people would be willing to charge,” Blake said.
A single room costs roughly C$800 (R4 817) a month to rent, close to the cost of a modest apartment in downtown Toronto.
Fort McMurray, where the mayor’s seventh-floor office would be considered high-rise, this year approved the construction of two residential towers – 31 and 28 storeys – and the city hopes that will help ease the problem.
Businesses are snapping up property around town to help house their employees or offer workers free or subsidised accommodation. – Reuters
