Source of Mysterious Gas Leak Explosion in Canadian Town Stumps Officials - The New Yor... - 0 views
-
Electricity is cut off. Guards sit in cars on every corner. Hundreds of people are out of their homes, some without access to their clothing or belongings.
-
More than four months after the blast shuttered Wheatley’s downtown and injured 20 of the town’s 2,900 residents, the authorities still don’t know where the gas leak came from, or why it happened.
-
Many are now grappling with whether the center of the town, which was formally recognized in 1865, should be permanently abandoned.
- ...14 more annotations...
-
“It still is one of those like really surreal things where you tell people like, yeah, the town blew up,” said Stephanie Charbonneau, a schoolteacher who was forced to flee her house with her family. “Who knows what’s going to happen at the end of all of this? What is Wheatley going to look like?”
-
In the 1890s, gas wells were dug to supply heat and power to homes and businesses in and around Wheatley, which is in southwestern Ontario on Lake Erie. Over time, the wells became obsolete and buildings were constructed directly on top of them; the wells’ locations were loosely, if at all, documented.
-
Before the blast, Wheatley was mostly known for its Lake Erie fishery; a shipyard; and a lakeside provincial park. Few people in the community knew about the gas wells, or that an explosion had leveled a meeting hall in 1936.
-
About 300 people are still not allowed to return to their homes, and 38 of Wheatley’s businesses remain closed. There’s no estimate for when, or if, everyone will be allowed to return home permanently — or whether the destroyed buildings can even be rebuilt. Mr. Shropshire said it may prove impossible to ever safely reopen the area around the blast.
-
Sensors were then installed and quickly began detecting hazardous gases, leading firefighters to evacuate the area around the building twice more during the summer.
-
“Well, here we go again,” Mr. Ingram recalled saying to his wife that evening. “Sooner or later this place is going to blow up.”
-
Local officials quickly opened an investigation. Using ground-penetrating radar, they discovered the site of an old well under a paved parking lot behind the explosion site. Closer to the site, the ground continued to burp gas about every 40 days, which hinted at the source of the gas leak, and also spurred fears of another explosion.
-
“I’m reasonably confident that they’re going to find the source of the gas,” Mr. Shropshire said. “Whether or not it can be mitigated — that’s an entirely different question.”
-
The first sign of trouble was on June 2, when Whit Thiele, a local business owner, went to investigate a foul odor in the basement of a downtown commercial building he owned. There, he saw water pouring through cracks in the foundation and through a drain in the floor before pooling into a fizzing mass.
-
The province has committed about $3.96 million in assistance, but several shop owners said they have yet to see any of that money. They believe individual payments will be far short of what they will need to restart business.
-
At a heated public meeting in November, local officials acknowledged the frustration and anger. But they also emphasized the complexity of the problem and said it will take time to solve it.
-
“I don’t want anyone to guess what the problem is, dump concrete on it and 60 years from now my grandkids who could be living in Wheatley have the same darn problem again,” Melissa Harrigan, a member of the town council, said at the meeting. “I am so sorry that it is disrupting your lives in so many ways I can’t imagine, I truly can’t, but I can say we’re trying.”
-
Ms. Declerck said she was concerned that the blast may have left her shop’s building structurally unsound. Like many people in Wheatley, she’s skeptical that a permanent fix for the leaking gas will ever be found.