Sensors were installed and quickly began to detect hazardous gases, leading firefighters to evacuate the area around the building twice more
More than four months after a gas leak blast shattered Wheatley’s downtown area and injured 20 of the town’s 2,900 residents, authorities still don’t know where the gas leak came from or why it happened, an Indian Express report says.
Officials are still frantically working to unravel the grim mystery of what exactly caused a gas explosion in August in Wheatley, Ontario — and how to prevent another explosion from happening.
Electricity has been 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.
Residents and local officials are examining the risks associated with the town’s history as a site of 19th-century gas wells, vestiges of the area’s oil and gas industry.
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.
Many are now wondering whether the center of the town, which was formally recognized in 1865, should be permanently abandoned.
“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 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?”
Before the August 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 razed a meeting hall in 1936. Stories of gas leaks from the town’s oldest residents and newspaper accounts of older explosions begin circulating only after the August explosion.
“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 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?”
While experts from Alberta, the capital of Canada’s oil and gas industry, have been brought in to assess how and why the gas is surfacing, the threat of another explosion has slowed their progress.
About 300 people are still not allowed to return to their homes, and 38 of Wheatley’s businesses remain closed.
There is no estimate for when, or if, everyone will be allowed to return home permanently — or whether the destroyed buildings can even be rebuilt. Wheatley residents have gone from shock to dismay to anger that more hasn’t been done to solve the mystery of the explosion or to start working on repairs. 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 last year, 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.
But it is still unclear who will bear responsibility for the cost of all this damage and loss . The companies that drilled the wells are long gone. There is talk that lawyers representing Wheatley residents will soon ask a court to approve a class-action lawsuit against the municipality, which owns the parking lot covering one of the wells.
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