West Coast Now
One of our neighbours to the north had quite the fright from an angry grizzly bear, as captured in this wild Youtube video posted by user Sugardaddy669.
In the clip, a worker on a remote oil field in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, jumps up onto the cab of his truck as a massive grizzly bear charges him. Shouts can be heard off-camera as the mama bear then runs away, towards her two grizzly bear cubs as they take off in the distance.
According to USA Today, one employee explained that “the sow was aggressive because [she] had temporarily lost sight of her other cub.”
This isn’t the first time that the Arctic Pipe Inspection yard employees have run into the grizzly family. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game had reportedly warned them that the mama grizzly and her cubs regularly come by to feed from local dumpsters.
Staying bear-aware on the job can be a matter of life and death. On this side of the border, an oil sands worker named Lorna Weafer was killed by a black bear on a Suncore site north of Fort McMurray, Alberta in 2014.
Similar to the Alaskan story, a Kitimat woman had an alarming run-in with a grizzly bear earlier this summer after she was chased into the Kitimat River by a mama protecting her cubs.
Bear experts say the best defense is still bear spray: “Our studies have shown bear spray to be 80 to 90 percent effective in all sorts of different circumstances with black bears and grizzly bears,” University of Calgary’s Stephen Herrero told the CBC.
