The nightmare on Adelaide Avenue is continuing with further oilspill lawsuits in the offing.
The owner of a lot at the top of the road, who has already had to demolish his house after an oil company mistakenly delivered 308 litres of oil to a disconnected tank, is now facing delays obtaining a provincial certificate, which confirms the lot has been remediated, because of possible lawsuits on behalf of the previous owner of a house down the street.
“This is not a whole lot of fun,” said the owner of the now-flattened lot at 2853 Adelaide Ave., Terry Phillips, who is continuing to pay his mortgage and has building plans sitting at Saanich municipal hall, waiting for a provincial sign-off.
He’s also lost any income he could have received from his original plan to rent out the house.
“This sounds as if it could hold it up for years,” Phillips said. “I am just hoping the ministry looks at the evidence and signs off on this.”
After oil started leaking out of drains around Gina Dolinsky’s house at 2837 Adelaide Ave. last March, investigators initially suspected the contamination came from misdelivered oil.
However, the characteristics of the oil were different. After oil started flowing from Dolinsky’s house in December, the province searched for the source. It determined the oil came from a buried oil tank next door at 2839 Adelaide Ave. that had been improperly decommissioned in 1981.
Dolinsky has spent more than $30,000 on the cleanup so far. Like most homeowners, she is not insured and was forced to sue her neighbour, Gavin Edwards, and the house’s previous owners to try to recoup her costs.
Edwards, who bought the house last year and did not know the buried tank existed, has spent more than $60,000 on cleanup.
Phillips, whose remediation costs are being picked up by the oil company’s insurance, believed he was out of the mix and rebuilding could start shortly. But, last week, Dave Rogers of B.C. Hazmat Management Ltd., Phillips’s remediation company, received a note from the province.
Colm Condon, the Environment Ministry’s land-remediation manager, said he had been contacted by lawyer Peter Jones, who suspects the oil further down the street came from the Phillips house.
Jones, acting for Balwinder Kaur Bal, former owner of the house where the buried tank was found, said in a letter to Condon that he believes the source of all the Adelaide oil is the Phillips property.
“We understand that an application has been made for a certificate of compliance from the ministry stating that there is no impact from the spill at 2853 Adelaide on either 2837 Adelaide or 2839 Adelaide,” says the letter from Jones.
“We think the conclusion is incorrect and that the contamination at both properties was a result of the spill at 2853 Adelaide.”
Condon said the information that Jones intends to submit will be considered before a decision is made.
The idea is based on rainfall amounts, which had no effect until after the spill farther up the street, even though the tank had been buried in the next-door yard for decades.
But Rogers said it is impossible that the oil came from the Phillips property, especially as it has different characteristics and would have had to go uphill to get to Dolinsky’s house.
“We have provided the Ministry of Environment with all the information that the only off-site migration was toward Colquitz,” Rogers said. “We have scientific and physical evidence that the two releases were not related.”
If the oil had come from the Phillips property, it is likely the half-dozen houses between it and the Dolinsky house would also be contaminated, he said.
An Environment Ministry spokesman said information from the lawyer was provided to Phillips by Condon as a courtesy.
“In cases like these, the ministry’s primary role is to ensure human health and the environment are protected,” he said.
