The municipality of Chatham-Kent is asking residents of Wheatley to avoid unnecessary trips to the area of Chestnut and Erie Streets starting Monday as crews work to address another gas leak in the area.
This time, it’s on private property, Chris Case said, who's the municipality's fire chief.
“The property owner is preempting an issue by approaching the province to see if they can investigate and deal with this before it becomes an issue,” Case told CBC News.
“So it’s really a good news story for the community.”
Chatham-Kent has been dealing with problems caused by gas leaks from abandoned wells for several years, Case said, culminating in an explosion in 2021 and a subsequent effort to cap the wells involved.
Then in June of this year, emergency crews evacuated a portion of downtown Wheatley after discovering hydrogen sulphide gas bubbling behind the library.
It was consultants following up on the library leak who detected the low levels of methane and other gases on the Chestnut and Erie property, Case said.
"The Province of Ontario has retained Rimkus, a qualified contractor, to investigate and remediate the presence of gas at a private property in the Chestnut/Erie Street area,” the Municipality of Chatham-Kent said in a news release.
It’s the same contractor that has been involved in the municipal projects, Case said.
“We’ll also be sending some of our people just to make sure that … everybody knows what’s going on,” he added.
Ontario has records for approximately 27,000 oil and gas wells, primarily on private land in southwestern Ontario, according to a government news release from 2023.
The province that year committed more than $23 million to develop a strategy to identify and plug them.