More than 50,000 gallons of oil spill near sacred land in Canada

Unused pipes.
(Image credit: Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

More than 52,800 gallons of oil have leaked onto the Ocean Man First Nation reserve in Saskatchewan, and investigators are trying to determine the source of the spill.

"We need to, obviously, as part of that investigation make that determination of when exactly the leak did take place and whether the monitoring system that the company employs is adequate enough," Dustin Duncan, the province's energy minister, said Tuesday. After smelling the scent of oil for a week, a resident notified the tribal chief on Friday, and they contacted Tundra Energy Marketing Ltd., which has a line adjacent to the spill. Several different energy companies have assets in the area, and while Tundra is leading cleanup efforts, the company has not confirmed that its pipeline is the one leaking. There are no homes near the spill, but it is close to a cemetery on what is is considered sacred land.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.