Finding oil on your land would usually qualify as good news.
Unless you’re digging a dugout and uncover a 45-year-old oil disposal pit.
That’s what happened to Arle Nelson last fall and it looks like he’ll be several thousand dollars poorer as a result.
“It was contaminated big time,” Nelson said in an interview last week. “It would make your eyes water to walk down there.”
The 37-year-old Hodgeville, Sask., farmer bought four quarter-sections of pasture land last spring. It looked like any other piece of land he’d ever seen.
Read Also
Land crash warning rejected
A technical analyst believes that Saskatchewan land values could be due for a correction, but land owners and FCC say supply/demand fundamentals drive land prices – not mathematical models
In the fall, he decided a new dugout was in order and set to work. About two metres below the surface, he struck oil.
But this was no celebration-inducing geyser. Rather, it was a nearly half-metre wide layer of old oil and oil products dating back to some exploration activity carried out in 1951 and again in 1964.
“There was nothing on the surface to indicate anything unusual, at least not to the untrained eye,” said Nelson. “An oil industry expert might have noticed something, but that was the last thing we were looking for.”
The lesson for other farmers, he said, is to do an environmental audit before buying land, even if you think you know the history of the property and even if it looks perfectly normal.
Ironically, an audit might not have helped in this case, as a later search of the land titles revealed no record of the oil exploration. It was only by pursuing the matter with the provincial energy department that Nelson learned the property’s history.
It had changed hands several times in the intervening years, and the last seller was an older woman whose husband was incapacitated and unable to communicate at the time the deal was struck.
Nelson said it should be clearly marked on the legal title document any time oil activity is carried out.
“Who knows what else is out there?” he said.
Normally the polluter would be responsible for the clean-up, but the oil companies involved are no longer in business.
Nelson and his lawyer Julian Bodnar of Saskatoon say the provincial government should pay for the cleanup in such cases, since the province profited from the exploration, but so far they have had no success. Officials from the department of energy and mines could not be reached for comment by press time.
This year, because there was so little run-off, the 14-foot deep dugout didn’t fill up to the contamination level, so it has been usable. In a normal year that wouldn’t be the case.
Meanwhile, Nelson’s bills keep mounting: $2,500 to dig the original dugout, $1,500 to cover it in, $2,500 to dig a new dugout and the inevitable legal bills.
