"Though high rates of the disease persist among the nearby Indigenous communities, the Canadian government is weighing rules that may allow energy giants to release treated mining waste into the river system."
"In a tiny hamlet of the Canadian subarctic, something was wrong with the fish.
Indigenous elders and university scientists stood over a tarp of dissected walleye on the banks of a channel near Fort Chipewyan, Alberta. The scientists clutched clipboards as they analyzed humpbacks, lesions, discolored scales and outsize livers. An elder, who had long relied on the waterway’s marine life for sustenance, knew simply by first glance: “No good.”
It was five days into their investigation on the freshwater Chenal des Quatre Fourches, in a place everyone just called Cutfish. They had pitched tents among the diamond willow and settled in for a week of dissections — their best chance at understanding the contaminants they believed were plaguing the food supply from one of the largest industrial operations on Earth.
That operation was more than 100 miles upstream, where energy companies, including a subsidiary of Exxon Mobil, were drilling for a viscous form of petroleum called bitumen, using water from the Athabasca River to extract it from deposits that stretch out beneath some 140,000 square kilometers of boreal forest. Massive pools of toxic waste with known carcinogens — their collective volumes estimated at more than half a million Olympic-size swimming pools — sit near the river, and an analysis suggests they are leaking around 11 million liters per day into the groundwater. As oil-company operations have increased, so have bouts of unexplained illness among residents of Fort Chipewyan."
Emily Baumgaertner Nunn reports for the New York Times March 10, 2026.
