Mountain View County officials are looking into solutions for contamination issues at old county-owned shops in Carstairs, Didsbury, Olds and Sundre.
Administration officials recently recommended that council spend $275,000 on remediating the contamination at the shop in Carstairs. But council directed administration to prepare a report addressing contamination issues on all of the sites in the county.
James Crozier, project coordinator with the county, said all of the sites have salt contamination.
“Practices have changed quite a bit. It used to be that we were allowed to just store salt piles outside, they'd get rained on and then the salt would go into the soil,” said Crozier.
“That's not the case anymore, now all salt is stored inside, in kind of weatherproof buildings. But any of these old sites where we used to store salt outside pretty much have salt contamination in the soil.”
Officials have paid for studies to be conducted on all of the sites over a number of years and some have more contamination than others.
He said the county can take one of two approaches and either remediate the contamination at the site or monitor it.
The sites in Didsbury and Sundre are currently being monitored and officials are looking at doing the same for the Olds site.
“We just monitor and we just make sure we are in fact not making the problem worse,” he said. “Eventually we may remediate, but there's no immediate plan to do so.”
The county purchased a reverse osmosis machine that was custom built for the Carstairs shop in 2012. They received it in 2014 with the intention of installing it to remediate the contamination at the shop in Carstairs.
Officials attempted to tender out the project twice but weren't able to find a suitable candidate within the county's budget.
Administration has recommended for council to budget $275,000 in 2016 to install the machine as well as $80,000 a year for maintenance starting in 2017, to be funded through tax revenue.
But there is no guarantee the reverse osmosis machine would clean up the contamination.
“The problem with contaminated sites is you never really know what's going to happen until you get into it. It's just one of those things, you never know how bad it is until you start trying to fix it,” he said.
“This method has been quite successful in the past, it's a proven method to work most of the time, assuming everything goes well. But contamination is a pretty tricky thing to deal with.”
If council chooses to monitor the site, administration recommends selling the reverse osmosis machine. Council could also choose to remove all of the contaminated soil on the site, but it is more costly and may not be effective.
Officials are also looking at remediating the contamination at the site in Sundre.
“Because we don't have any operations in there anymore that would lead to further contamination, so if we clean it up now then we don't have to worry about it later,” he said.
Council tabled the matter during its Feb. 10 meeting. Crozier said a report addressing contamination issues at all of the sites will likely be presented to council in April.
"The problem with contaminated sites is you never really know what's going to happen until you get into it."James Crozier,MVC project coordinator
