Deep interceptor drains are commonly used to control canal seepage in southern Alberta, Canada. Recently, shallow grid drainage was introduced. A study was initiated in 1987 to assess the effectiveness of grid drainage to intercept canal and natural groundwater seepage and reclaim the resulting saline affected land. / Using a groundwater flow model, MODFLOW, it was found that a single deep interceptor drain would have failed to intercept all canal seepage and maintain the water table downslope of the canal below the 1.0 m design water table depth. Conversely, simulations indicated that with a grid drainage system, all canal and natural groundwater seepage would be intercepted and the water table would remain below the design water table depth, with or without irrigation recharge that would maintain a steady state salt balance. / The benefits of fall irrigation were demonstrated using three test plots near the canal.

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This interdisciplinary project offers new insights into the reclamation history of two of the most controversial and contaminated sites in Canadian history: the Sydney tar ponds and coke ovens and the Athabasca oil sands. It argues that Canada’s natural resource-dependent economy, combined with jurisdictional uncertainty, created a hesitant, fragmentary site cleanup regime, one that left room for different ideas about landscapes to shape and even distort reclamation’s goals and processes. In the absence of substantive reclamation standards and legislation, researchers struggled to accommodate the unique challenges of the oil sands during the 1960s and 1970s. Ambitious goals for reclamation faltered, and even the most successful examples of oil sands reclamation differed significantly from the pre-extraction environment; reclamation was not restoration. Planners envisioned transforming northeastern Alberta into a managed wilderness and recreation nirvana, but few of these plans were realised. The Sydney tar ponds experience suggests that truly successful reclamation cannot exist unless past injustices are fully acknowledged, reparations made, and a more complete narrative of contamination and reclamation constructed through open deliberation. Reclamation, after all, does not repair history; nor can it erase the past. Effective oil sands reclamation, then, requires a reconsideration of the site’s past and an acknowledgement of the perpetuated vulnerabilities and injustices wrought by development and reclamation.