Over at Global, David Skok and his team have created a very nice visualization of the over 28,666 crude oil spills that have happened on Alberta pipelines over the last 37 years (that’s about two a day). Indeed, for good measure they’ve also visualized the additional 31,453 spills of “other” substance carried by Alberta pipeline (saltwater, liquid petroleum, etc..)
They’ve even created a look up feature so you can tackle the data geographically, by name, or by postal code. It is pretty in depth.
Of course, I believe all this data should be open. Sadly, they have to get at it through a complicated Access to Information Request that appears to have consumed a great deal of time and resources and that would probably only be possible by a media organizations with the dedicated resources (legal and journalistic) and leverage to demand it. Had this data been open there would have still been a great deal of work to parse, understand and visualize it, but it would have helped lower the cost of development.
In fact, if you are curious about how they got the data – and the sad, sad, story it involved – take a look at the fantastic story they wrote about the creation of their oilspill website. This line really stood out for me:
An initial Freedom of Information request – filed June 8, 2012, the day after the Sundre spill – asked Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development for information on all reported spills from the oil and gas industry, from 2006 to 2012.
About a month later, Global News was quoted a fee of over $4,000 for this information. In discussions with the department, it turned out this high fee was because the department was unable to provide the information in an electronic format: Although it maintained a database of spills, the departmental process was to print out individual reports on paper, and to charge the requester for every page.
So the relevant government department has the data in a machine readable form. It just chooses to only give it out in a paper form. Short of simply not releasing the data at all it is hard to imagine a more obstructionist approach to preventing the public from accessing environmental data their tax dollars paid to collect and that is supposed to be in the public interest. You essentially look at thousands of pieces of paper and re-enter tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of data points into spreadsheets. This is a process designed to prevent you from learning anything and frustrating potential users.
Let’s hope that when the time comes for the Global team to update this tool and webpage there will be open data they can download and access to the task is a little easier.
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