Nearly eight months after an explosion rocked Wheatley, Ont., more residents are finally returning home - The Globe and Mail

Becky Lamb of Wheatley, Ont., surveys the remnants of her basement after sewage water was pumped out following a months-long evacuation prompted by a gas explosion from a buried gas well. Ms. Lamb and her husband are unsure if they will ever be able to live in the structure again.Colin Graf/The Globe and Mail

Becky Lamb dons a respirator and rubber boots to head into her basement. The day before, a truck hauled away more than 30,000 litres of sewage-filled water.

“It’s classified as a biohazard,” warns the resident of Wheatley, a small community on the shores of Lake Erie in Southern Ontario.

It’s been almost eight months since an explosion destroyed an old commercial building in the town’s core and forced the Lambs and more than 60 other households to leave their homes with just a few minutes’ warning.

The Aug. 26 blast injured 20 people and damaged several businesses, houses and apartment buildings – some so badly that they had to be demolished. Services, such as the post office, a bank and library, had to close or move to temporary locations.

Investigators hired by the province to identify the cause have found three old gas wells, and it is suspected that gas was leaking from one or more of them. Oil and gas workers have descended on the town of about 3,000 people east of Windsor to excavate the well sites, collect gas samples and conduct mitigation work.

The Ontario Petroleum Institute (OPI), a group representing the industry, says there are 27,000 wells in the province and most are on private land. The OPI estimates there are 4,400 orphan wells that pose a potential hazard to landowners or public health, all in southwestern Ontario.

As the work proceeds in Wheatley, some residents such as the Lambs are being allowed to finally return to their homes because the danger of hydrogen-sulphide releases has been reduced. Others who live within 50 metres of potential gas leaks have been ordered to stay out.

“There’s only so much crying you can do,” says Ms. Lamb, who has moved several times since the evacuation. She and her husband, Bugsy, first stayed at their daughter’s home, then two Airbnbs in nearby towns. Their insurance company paid their rent at first, and the municipality has since picked up the tab.

Working full-time in a hardware store and caring for her mother two days a week has kept Ms. Lamb busy, but “staring at the walls” has been hard on her retired husband. Counselling has helped, she says, but “Bugsy really suffered” for a while. “He had some depression going on there.”

The Lambs don’t know if they will be able to live in their house again. While from the outside there are few signs of trouble, months of damp from the sewage water in the finished basement ruined not only that level of the house, but also led to mould growing throughout the main floor. Both the sewage pump and sump pump in the basement stopped working when utilities were cut off by emergency officials for fear of igniting another explosion.

They’re waiting for a decision from their insurance company on whether the house will ever be habitable.

Joe Gruber finds his kitchen little changed from the day he, his wife and their pets had to flee the home they had purchased just three weeks before the Wheatley explosion. Once electricity and other utilities are restored, he hopes to move back in.Colin Graf/The Globe and Mail

Other residents have been luckier than the Lambs. Joe Gruber’s home, directly across the street, has no basement and doesn’t appear to need much more than a good cleaning.

“That’s the first time I’ve sat on that couch in eight months,” he says during the Easter weekend. The house is the first home he and his wife have owned. They had lived there for just three weeks before the explosion, and only had time to pack two small bags and grab their pets before being forced to leave.

Since then, the couple has lived six months in a rented house in the town of Kingsville. Joe’s daily 45-minute drive to and from his college program in horticulture in the town of Ridgetown just about doubled.

“That’s a lot of gas money really fast,” he says.

A series of gas leaks had already started in Wheatley when the Grubers bought their home, but “we weren’t overly concerned about it,” he recalls. “We knew about the leaks but they only evacuated part of the street for a short period of time. You don’t expect there to be an explosion though.”

On the day of the explosion, emergency responders were evacuating parts of Wheatley because a gas leak had been detected earlier that day by monitoring devices set up after two earlier gas releases that summer.

Sharon Stasso of Wheatley is angry that the problem of orphan wells is not being dealt with by governments. “They need to take charge. It’s partly their responsibility. It’s nasty these wells have been left by the companies that deserted them but somebody has to step up and take care of these issues.” She says the Wheatley explosion “should never have happened. They put our lives in some jeopardy.”

Ms. Stasso and her partner, Kelly Bruner, were on their back deck when the explosion happened. The force of the blast gave them both concussions. Ms. Stasso had neck pain and ringing in her ears and couldn’t work for three weeks as an occupational therapy aide. While they were given the chance to visit their house during the Easter weekend, they passed since they aren’t allowed to move back yet. “It just wasn’t worth it. It just stirs up more emotions,” Mr. Bruner says.

Their neighbour Kay Shaw still has wooden boards from the exploded building in her driveway. She also feels governments have been slow to help. “If we were down in Toronto, or London, or Ottawa it would all be solved by now, but we’re just little Wheatley,” she says.

Work on the three wells found within the block of the explosion is ongoing and is expected to wrap up by the end of May, according to Jennifer Barton of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, who was addressing a virtual public meeting on the issue on April 9.

Among the orphan wells in Wheatley and across the region, some are more than a century old when “plugging practices were rudimentary,” according to information from the OPI. In 2020, the group and the Ontario government asked Ottawa to contribute $270-million to plug and reclaim the risky wells, but those funds have not been provided. In April, 2020, the federal government offered $1.7-billion to clean up orphan wells in Alberta, Saskatchewan and British Columbia.

Most businesses in Wheatley, east of Windsor, remain closed and inaccessible after the explosion destroyed a building near the main intersection.Colin Graf/The Globe and Mail

Don Shropshire, the retiring Chief Administrative Officer of Chatham-Kent, the municipality that contains Wheatley, told the April meeting “we have had world-class experts providing advice and guidance and taking steps to try and do everything possible” to make the town “as safe as possible.” But, he noted, risks will remain.

“There are thousands of wells across the province of Ontario and there have been gas pockets in this region for tens of thousands of years so there’s not going to be a 100-per-cent guarantee.”

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Nearly eight months after an explosion rocked Wheatley, Ont., more residents are finally returning home - The Globe and Mail
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