An unnamed woman on the Suncor Oilsands site has died after being mauled by a black bear. This is such a tragedy, and we here at One River News are sending our thoughts out to the worker’s family and friends who have been directly affected by this.

The Oilsands are butt up against the wild nature of the boreal forest. Tailings ponds sit next to rivers teeming with fish. Deer and moose are often seen near camps and SAGD wells. Aside from Fort Chipewyan 300 KM away, and a couple sporadic camps, nature reigns north of the ‘Bridge to Nowhere‘, part of Fort Chipewyan’s ice road infrastructure.

I saw a bear the first time I took a tour of Suncor’s Wapisiw Lookout in 2011. Wapisew Lookout is the name of the first reclaimed tailings pond and Suncor likes to show it off. I was filming an interview with a representative from the company, thinking that the place looked rather bleak. Freshly planted rows of trees are hovered over by dead upside down planted snags. It was quite eerie in an industrial green landscape kind of way. The out-of-place snags provide perching spaces for birds of prey that keep down rodent populations, but I don’t recall seeing any that October afternoon. Suddenly my interviewee’s face showed shock. “Look out, there’s a bear!”

“Are we alright” I asked, dumfounded, turning around to see two black bears approximately 50 feet from our position.

“Noo,” she replied in a low and drawn out sound. We scurried to the safety of a vehicle.

The two bears were young, they had an adolescent look to them that I’ve only seen on documentaries. They were skinny too, perhaps on account of the bad season it was for berries. Elder’s in Fort Chipewyan had informed me about that earlier that season. Perhaps from the disturbances and noises of resource extraction that surround the area for miles in either direction. We honked the horn and eventually they moseyed on away, and we were able to finish the interview. The representative was beaming with the good fortune of catching big wildlife on a former tailings pond. I thought was really neat, too.

We’ll learn more about the fate of this woman in the coming days. Suncor, and indeed all of the other companies will review their safety policies and come up with a plan to keep it from happening again. It’s a tragedy, for sure, and one must be mindful that the Oilsands are in nature.