Fort McMurray

Harv and I packed up our camper and a covered trailer full of equipment and headed up to Fort McMurray in northern Alberta last week.

For those of you unfamiliar with this town, it is the centre of the Oil Sands industry in Canada. It was a town built to accomodate its population of 30,000, but with the rapid expansion of the oil sands, it quickly outgrew its infrastructure and now boasts a population of 70,000 or more. Many of the people working there live in camps but those who try to find housing for their families find real estate and rental housing at a premium. Even hotel rooms are hard to come by although that has improved in the past year as more hotels have been built. Even so, the last time Harv was up there, his hotel rooms ranged from $200. - $300. /night! Not what you'd expect in a town 5 hours North of Edmonton.

Because of the high cost of hotels and meals, we opted to take the camper and I came along to do the cooking and to keep Harv company in the evenings and on the long drive (15-18 hours one way). I love going along when we take the camper. I bring books to read and various projects to keep myself busy and I love cooking in my little tin tent. This time I worked on one of my photo books and sorted through my old binder of recipes, throwing out unused recipes and organizing those I use regularly.

Fort McMurray is one of the few places I know that has traffic jams heading out to seemingly nowhere. The various oil companies have their operations in territory that can be 100 km from the town and there are 2 and 3 lane highways heading out to the oil sand sites and the same number of lanes coming back to the town. At shift change times, the highway is bumper to bumper with buses, pick-up trucks and service vehicles. Every so often all the vehicles on the road have to pull over to the shoulder in order to let trucks with MASSIVE loads go by.

Truck boxes for the largest trucks in the world, sections of new plant construction and nameless components that defy description - all have to be transported to the various sites.

Being in the oil filtration business, there are a lot of applications for our products in Fort McMurray. Harv's job this trip was to demonstarate how our filtration units can clean the oil in the wheel planetaries of some of those huge trucks. Because of the very viscous (thick) oil, this has been difficult to do. However our equipment did the job in an efficient and remarkable way. I'm very proud of my husband who devised a way to solve the problems
Here is a comparison of the dirty oil before filtration and the clean oil after it's been filtered. This oil is very expensive and when it is contaminated with dirt and water, it damages the working parts. So using our system can save the companies huge amounts of money in maintenence costs.

It was a successful trip and we are excited with the positive results and the enthusiastic response from our customer.

(I'd hoped to post a few more pictures but our server is down and with it, access to the pictures I need, so it will have to wait until later)

More on our trip in the next post.