General Urban Kitchener Updates and Rumours

[danbrotherston]

Easiest tell for these spaces are the (usually blue) groundwater sample wells and a few drums around the site. Where those are, you can be fairly certain some level of contamination is being monitored and would need remediation.

The drums are a good tell but it doesn't necessarily mean that contamination is being monitored. In some cases the tailings from doing the well/borehole drilling itself aren't allowed to be left on site, so the drums are used to dispose of them. Likewise when you're developing a well (involves pumping very specific volumes of water out) you need to dispose of the water that you pump out even if it has no contaminants so the drums are used. Then you have the cases where the water is contaminated.

I will say that this property may not be the worse place for contamination downtown, I've done some work elsewhere downtown on a larger site and on that site there are some extremely high levels of hydrocarbons and VOC's in the ground. So much so that after pumping nearly 90 litres out of a singular well (3x the well volume) the water was still coming out with a very strong hydrocarbon odour, had a obvious sheen and was tinted black, so there's definitely other places downtown that are just as bad. 

If there's proof that the contamination from that grass area with the trail has spread to another property, for example lets say across the tracks to Station Park (I have no idea if this has actually happened) they can sue the property owners for clean up costs even if the current owners didn't contaminate the land themselves. So there's also a mess of legal issues when it comes to contamination.

AFAIK the city is the current property owner. As has been the case for much of our history, the capitalists have fled with the money, and we are left saddled with the externalities.

In any case, with the current trend of land downtown, at some point, the land will be come so valuable that it's value will exceed the cost of cleaning it up, and then at that point, the city will sell it off, hopefully with a trail easement.