NDG residents waiting to exhale

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by George Maddux

"800,000 litres of gas. Canada's worst gas contamination site." So read a sign erected by an anonymous protester at St-Ignatius and Côte St-Luc. The unflattering description stood briefly last week, like a lonely headstone on a nondescript part of NDG that for decades held a gas station.

The original Texaco station was taken over by Esso in 1989, who soon discovered that the land was soaked in gas. The station went broke and a cleanup started about four years back. One unhappy critic of Esso's efforts is nearby resident Michael Steidl: "Hurry the thing up," he says of the cleanup project that involves inviting tiny bacteria to belly up to an all-you-can-eat buffet of petrol. Esso is encouraging the gas-eating bacteria by feeding them nutrients and oxygen via 130 wells stuffed eight metres into the soil. Steidl thinks that while the bacteria munch away, residents should be compensated for poisoned real estate values and the general pain in the backside the cleanup has caused.

But local city councillor Jeremy Searle doesn't consider the problem much more than a pedestrian inconvenience. "The calls I get are about how the mud covers the sidewalk and makes it necessary to walk in the road," he says. Meanwhile Imperial Oil cleanup specialist Henry Orban says companies have replaced rusty subterranean gas tanks with new fiberglass containers. "It's like a vacuum bottle. If the vacuum breaks, we know immediately if there's a problem." Says the environmental specialist: "It was our management's view that it may cost more money, but in the long term it'll allow them to get rid of guys like me."