Clean ... or not

One of the things that I’ve been impressed with since I started driving a little further around Alberta (ie to Calgary and the Rockies) is just how clean the roadsides are along the way. There simply doesn’t seem to be the rubbish that I am used to seeing on Australian roadsides.

As far as I can determine, it must have something to do with the bears. After all, leaving food scraps and rubbish around is, from all accounts a very silly thing to do whilst there’s bears about. I guess that I first noticed it around the bins that you see between Fort Mac and Edmonton. There’s not rubbish over flowing the bear-proof bin, just nice clean bitumen. I seem to remember too many occasions when I drove past a rest-stop in remote Oz where there was simply rubbish over flowing the bin, not to mention soft drink (that would be ‘pop’ over here in Canada) bottles and beer bottles scattered about the fringes of the road and rest areas.

Its rather pleasant really, to just see the country side.

There’s something of a dichotomy though, because for as clean as Alberta seems to be, Fort McMurray is just plain dirty. Not garbage dirty, dirt dirty. There’s so much construction work and mining around here that there’s a constant lift of dust about the place. And now that we’re getting rain as well, its mud, not dirt.

There seems to be absolutely no control over restricting the traffic of dirt from construction sites. I remember going to University and learning about wash-down bays where trucks would be stopped to prevent them removing the dirt from site. I know for a fact that we were supposed to have one on the construction site that I worked on in Singapore (notably the concrete was laid, but the bay never finished or used in the time that I was there – not my decision).

But over here, there doesn’t appear to be any attempt at controlling it. I can see that the lovely white stuff that is to fall from the sky later won’t be white for long if its like this! Driving home yesterday, the dirt was a good 3 -6 inches high on top of the gutter and there was plenty spread out onto the road surface at the housing site just up the road. It gets pretty annoying when you have a nice clean car and mere days later its mud spattered and filthy!

I'm well over it considering I'm not real good at getting around washing cars at the best of times.