Suzy Thompson

Photos all taken at the containment wall between the Turner Valley Gas Plant and the Sheep River. The man in them is Turner Valley town councillor George Wallace

Turner Valley’s dreams of attracting business and doubling its population may be blinding some of its citizens to the poison under their feet.

The town is struggling to join Alberta’s economic boom, but its growth is locked in slow motion. Over the past 10 years it gained just 381 citizens. Meanwhile, nearby communities experienced exponential growth. The problem with Turner Valley could be a chronically low water supply — water has been rationed every May to October for years. With the completion of a new reservoir with the capacity to serve 4,000 people last January, this problem should be solved. Yet, the cause of Turner Valley’s stagnation may also be land notoriously contaminated with industry waste due to 90 years of oil and gas extraction.

From 1914 to the mid-’80s, Turner Valley’s economy was dominated by the Turner Valley Gas Plant. In 1985, the Mannix family of Calgary bought out the plant’s owner, Western Decalta. They took everything except the gas plant. A year later, the Alberta government did the Mannixes and Western Decalta a big favour when it bought the plant for $1, later declaring it a provincial historic resource.

A few years ago, the local historic society, whose members include the mayors of Turner Valley and Black Diamond and several town councillors, began to push the government to turn the plant into a museum. However, opinions vary over the safety of bringing tour groups here, and whether the abandoned plant really has the historic value its supporters claim it does.

The safety concerns are legitimate. The provincial government openly acknowledges problems on the site with asbestos, mercury and sulphur contamination. In 2005, the Calgary Health Region issued a ban for children and pregnant women from visiting the gas plant due to high levels of methyl mercury there. The ban was withdrawn after 3,000 tonnes of soil on the site was replaced.

Town administrator Stan Ogrodniczuk is a strong supporter of the museum plans. He admits the oil companies that have expressed interest in financing an interpretive centre are playing it safe, waiting for the provincial government to accept responsibility for cleanup costs should toxins be found. However, he claims the site is already clean and safe. Ogrodniczuk is quick to brush off contamination fears and return to discussing the potential boost an oil industry museum would give to the local economy. “By the time we end up, this could be huge, this could be world-class, and I’m not kidding,” he says.

Councillor George Wallace worked at the plant before it closed. He says the excitement about the museum has affected people’s brains even more than the sulphur in the air from local gas flares.

“I can tell you I know there’s contamination, from being there,” he says. “You’d be walking in [oil], because it would seep out of the ground around you from previous spills…. Over 100 years you get a few spills whether you like it or not.” Wallace says that while the rest of town council likely believes they are doing their best, they have forgotten how dangerous the plant really is.

This spring the provincial government built a rock wall around a portion of the plant to prevent anything from the abandoned land from seeping into the Sheep River. In July, Wallace and resident activist Roxanne Walsh reported orange sludge leaking into the river from the base of the wall.

What the sludge is and where it came from became the most important question in town, because Turner Valley drinks from the Sheep River. At a packed townhall meeting, Sameh Elsayed, the province’s senior environmental engineer, put the crowd’s mind at ease. Alberta Environment’s tests results confirmed the wall was not leaking. The orange goo was bacteria feeding from harmless iron in the water. Why it suddenly appeared was unknown.

Walsh and Wallace remain suspicious, and Ogrodniczuk isn’t surprised. This is because Walsh has become something of a thorn in Turner Valley’s side. “It started out with the gas plant, and she’s just looking at everything now,” laments Ogrodniczuk.

Walsh believes so firmly in the toxicity of Turner Valley, that in 2007 she launched an appeal with Alberta Environment to investigate the new reservoir. The hearing for that appeal ended in January, with a ruling the town re-examine the project in its entirety before turning the water on. So far, nothing much has been uncovered.

After all that, Ogrodniczuk says the town is tired of listening to Walsh. “When I met Roxanne, I met with her three times a day…. We spent so much money, and after awhile I said, ‘Roxanne, when you find something out there, come back and I’ll send some people. I can’t spend money on your dreams and your thinking.’”

Walsh and Ogrodniczuk say the battle has become personal and tiresome, and Walsh says residents accuse her of putting a black mark on their town just when things are beginning to take off. She argues that black mark or not, it’s wrong to promote a museum while ignoring sludge leaking from the gas plant into the water supply.

The containment wall butts along the river bank. Here and there water trickles from the silt and between the wall rocks. Where it does, the ground is coated with rust-coloured sludge. In the deeper pools it’s suspended in globular blooms. Where there is a spring, red tendrils sway in the current. In other places along the shallows a silver sheen coats the water’s surface.

When microbiologists Dr. Rolf Vinebrooke of the University of Alberta and Dr. Ray Turner of the University of Calgary were shown photos of the sludge, they were both hesitant to guess what it was, but agreed it couldn’t be good. The water is “definitely not drinkable by wildlife, livestock or humans,” says Vinebrook.

“There are far too many possibilities for me to even guess,” writes Turner in an e-mail. However, he concurs, “a lot of bacteria will grow using petroleum products quite nicely, also on the refining chemicals…. Is it toxic? Yes, the effluent would be chronically toxic with continual exposure.”

Wallace kneels beside one of the pools and stirs it with his finger. “I’ve seen a lot of rust stains in my hunting career, travelling around and that, but nothing that ever came in lumps,” he says. “I asked them [Alberta Environment], ‘Is there anywhere in Alberta where we could see this?’ One representative answered, ‘Well maybe in Swan Hills there was one somewhere.’” During the walk, Wallace pulls fragments of pipes from the water and explains how they were used when he worked at the plant.

Ogrodniczuk is convinced the matter is closed. “This iron oxide that is going to poison everybody, that was Canadian drinking quality standard. So you can dip into it and you can drink the stuff,” he says.