And the Indigenous communities around the oil sands reported things like rare cancers. And there were a few workplace deaths when I was there - the companies always downplayed how dangerous the actual sites were. It was a tragedy, and it shouldn’t have happened, but the ducks made headlines, and meanwhile, 2008 was one of the deadliest years for crashes on Highway 63, connecting Fort McMurray to Edmonton, which they called the Highway of Death. It was this mass casualty of wildlife and it looked really bad.

When the ducks hit the tailings pond, you could hear the necks snapping as the world turned to look at what was going on in Fort McMurray for the first time, because it made headlines all over the world. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. In an interview with Grist, Beaton explained why she thought a new story needed to be told about Alberta’s most controversial industry. It offers an empathetic picture of her coworkers while also portraying the harsh realities of life in the oil sands: isolation, environmental destruction, and for Beaton personally, an endless stream of sexist comments. Ducks has already drawn comparisons to classic graphic novels such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. Though Ducks maintains the same knack for humor, it is darker, recounting Beaton’s two years in Fort McMurray in impressive detail. Today, Beaton is best-known for her sharp historical and literary satire in the comic book Hark! A Vagrant, a New York Times bestseller.

Around the time the ill-fated ducks landed in the toxic pond, Beaton was working in an office for Shell in the Albian Sands, using the office copier on her lunch break to scan the cartoons that would launch her future career.

A white lie got her a job in the “tool crib” at the Syncrude Base Mine, where she handed wrenches and hard hats to workers. After graduating from university in 2005, Beaton left her home in Cape Breton, an island off the east coast of Canada, to try to pay off a mountain of student loans by working in Fort McMurray. Syncrude, the company that filled the tailings pond with the byproducts of oil production, was eventually fined nearly $3 million for negligence.īut at the same time, there were other problems in the oil sands - human ones - that escaped media attention, according to Kate Beaton, the author of the upcoming graphic novel Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands. The ducks’ deaths brought international attention to Northern Alberta. The birds, slick with oil, struggled to get out of the bitumen-covered water wildlife officials shot the ones that didn’t die to put them out of their misery.

In the spring of 2008, an estimated 1,600 migratory ducks landed in the wrong place: a pond of toxic sludge in Fort McMurray, Alberta, in the heart of Canada’s oil sands.

Ducks two years in the oil sands