Although Mountain View County's public works shop in Carstairs is budgeted for cleanup measures in 2012, the extent of salt and gasoline contamination on the site was spelled out to councillors at their Dec. 14 policies and priorities committee meeting.ìFirst and foremost, you not only have contamination on the property Ö but it does not respect property lines. So it's most probably migrating offsite to third parties,î environmental consultant Mike McCormick of Parkland GEO told P&P.The maintenance building and yard is situated on the west side of Ninth Avenue directly north of Alberta Powersports and south of the Town of Carstairs operational services yard. Contamination is believed to be the result of past methods of storing salt on the site and from an underground fuel tank that was used for school buses.In his summary, McCormick said tests showed that hydrocarbon and groundwater contamination exceed current provincial standards.ìAll groundwater samples were above Alberta Tier 2 guidelines.îNot taking action, he said, could result in Alberta Environment issuing a remediation order and the county could also face third-party litigation from adjacent landowners.Council budgeted $330,000 for cleanup measures in the 2012 interim budget and McCormick outlined recommended actions that are estimated to cost close to that amount. They include a groundwater interceptor system to control migration offsite and underground tank delineation.ìWe're recommending doing the studies and getting the tenders together to do the work in the 2012 construction season,î McCormick said, noting that ìthese are actually very low costs.îRyan Morrison, manager of infrastructure projects and technical services, pointed out the county had recently completed a similar cleanup of the Didsbury shop site.ìIt was a bigger yard with more pollution and we got through it, ì Morrison said.P&P recommended accepting the report as information and sending copies to the Town of Carstairs and Alberta Powersports.Meanwhile, council has also budgeted $156,500 for 2012 to clean up the former Sundre shop which was contaminated by fuel tanks removed from the property about 10 years ago.Asked during budget discussions last month whether the contamination was migrating offsite, Morrison told P&P that tests showed it was spreading into the street.To remediate the site, the consultant has recommended injecting a chemical called RegenOx into the contaminated groundwater and then after extraction, monitoring it for up to 18 months.
