While there was no widespread destruction in Wheatley, I saw the same sense of the community coming together to help people who were out of their homes that I’d previously witnessed in British Columbia. Everyone had a story about being helped out with housing, clothing, even children’s Christmas presents by people who lived outside the closed zone or in neighboring communities.
The need is very real. The local food bank, which had to relocate, served five to seven families a week in early 2020. Currently it has 40 clients, including individuals and families. It’s also now offering to include household goods and clothing. Donors have been generous to the point where the food bank is outgrowing its space, which includes a refrigerated semi trailer.
For the local businesses, the town’s state of limbo has added to the stresses caused by pandemic shutdowns. Fortunately for the local economy, the fish processing plants and the shipyard that are the big local employers are on the Lake Erie shoreline, a short drive or a long walk from downtown.
There is talk locally that if a permanent solution for the leaking gas can’t be found, it might be necessary to move the town center down toward the harbor.
That, however, might just be trading one problem for another. For the past few years, a long stretch of the former provincial highway that is Wheatley’s main street has been closed a few kilometers east of town. It runs on top of a cliff that has eroded, most likely because of climate change, to the point where officials fear that the road may vanish into Lake Erie.
While no of the people I met in Wheatley said they had anticipated a gas explosion — or had even known that the town might have been built on top of three abandoned wells — the issue of the oil and gas industry’s past haunting the present isn’t unique to the town. It is a major problem in Alberta, where there are about 71,000 abandoned wells in need of cleanup, although they are overwhelmingly outside urban areas.