Frustration is mounting for Wheatley residents since the August 26th explosion that flattened two buildings downtown and forced many from their homes.
A virtual town hall was held Saturday for affected residents to ask questions of municipal and provincial officials and voice their concerns.
Chatham-Kent’s General Manager of Community Human Services, April Rietdyk says residents are essentially going through the stages of grief.
“As the week has gone on, those emotions have moved through those normal kinds of things we see where people get that sense of frustration, anger, worry, when am I going to get back in my home, how are kids going to get to school?”
Rietdyk says over 150 residents have come to the reception centre at the Wheatley Arena since the blast to seek some sort of help.
Meantime, Chatham-Kent CAO Don Shropshire says experts suspect the hydrogen sulfide originated from an abandoned gas well, but the technical investigation continues.
“They say well, it’s likely a gas well, but we don’t know because there are other sources of leaks,” Shropshire says. “The technical experts…they want to identify property owners, get permission to go on their site and do some exploration, and try and just go through a process of elimination.”
The Ontario Fire Marshal’s office has completed its portion of the investigation.
At this point, nine households with 25 people are still being put up in hotels, while others have been able to find their own temporary accommodation.
Shropshire says the municipality has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars so far to keep the community safe, including gas monitoring and having emergency personnel on site 24/7 after each of the three gas leaks this summer.
“Staff have been working literally since the beginning of June on this event, it’s taken a lot of time but that’s the nature of emergency response. That’s currently on our dime until such time as somebody else offers to pick that up,” Shropshire says. “The cost for citizens is going to be similarly a matter of finding out what the source of the explosion is.”
A Windsor law firm is looking to file a class action suit on behalf of affected residents. Chatham-Kent’s legal team can’t comment on the legal action itself, they say for now the municipality is focusing its attention on the emergency response.
