What were your overall impressions?Įmily: This book is long, and spans years - though the setting feels bleak and unchanging at times, the pacing is nicely varied. Her experiences there, in a bleak and unfriendly environment where men outnumber women drastically, and almost everyone is displaced, are the subject of the memoir. She goes to isolated mining camps in Alberta to pay off her student loans as quickly as possible. WWAC-ers Elvie, Emily, and Masha gathered to discuss its features and impact.ĭucks: Two Years in the Oil Sands Kate Beatonĭucks: Two Years in the Oil Sands introduces Katie graduating from college and making the tough decision to work far away from her comfortable but impoverished home town. At over 400 pages of Beaton’s distinctive intimate and emotional style, Ducks is a remarkable addition to the graphic memoir genre, at turns hilarious and heartbreaking, telling a story I, personally, had never known. But a winter storm had delayed deployment of the system, a Syncrude spokesman said.Here at WWAC, we’ve been fans of Kate Beaton for a long time, so we were especially excited for the publication of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Beaton’s highly anticipated memoir of her time working in the isolated Alberta oil-mining camps. Migrating waterfowl are supposed to be kept from the poisonous waste-water ponds at the mines, where massive shovels pull tons of oil-laden sand from the ground, by sound-cannons that simulate gunfire. “I’m deeply disappointed and I know the Syncrude leadership team shares that disappointment.” “Without question, I think it was not only an unfortunate event but a really tragic one,” Imperial CEO Bruce March told reporters following the company’s annual meeting. Imperial has a 25 percent stake in oil sand producer Syncrude Canada Ltd, owner of the tailings pond in northern Alberta, where the ducks died earlier this week because a warning system meant to keep them off wasn’t operating.

The death of about 500 ducks that landed in a pond of oily, toxic sludge operated by Canada's biggest oil sands producer was tragic, the chief executive of Imperial Oil Ltd said on Thursday. A truck drives down a street at Syncrude's oil tar sands operation near Fort McMurray, Alberta in this file photo.

Ducks oil sands