Brad the scientist waved hi. Not at me, but at a woman driving by. I didn’t know it then, but we were congregating by contaminated land.
We were at the corner of Oakwood and Earnscliffe.
The ground below us wasn’t just pavement—it was history, buried in hydrocarbons. Once a Petro Canada gas station. Now a ghost lot owned by Suncor, fenced in and forgotten, except by Brad.
Brad is a scientist who focuses on neuroimaging. He takes medical images of our brains and analyzes them to improve the way we understand stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and psychiatric illnesses.
Brad and his neighbours had cleaned up the edges of the lot like archeologists preparing for a dig—scraping away layers of trash, weeds, and cigarette butts. But they never stepped inside. It’s private property, and everyone knew what lay beneath.
We were there to see how far the damage had spread. The kind you can’t see with the naked eye. You need to drill tiny boreholes in the earth and see what the ground spits back.
That’s where the iron caps come in— you can see them through the fence on the lot. And if you look down, you can see the same flat metal discs labeled “Monitor” spotting Oakwood from Earnscliffe to Conway. Brad said people in Hazmat suits show up every so often to take samples.
As we crouched beside a cap, squinting at the stamped metal, another of Brad’s neighbours wandered by. Then another.
Because of all this neighbourliness, Brad built good rapport with the man who owns the large building next to the lot—the one whose fence forms the southern border of contamination. That owner let us walk through his side lot, to see even more monitor caps, spread on the cement.
“The water table is contaminated with Benzene,” the neighbour said, quietly and matter-of-factly. Suncor gave him a small payment for his trouble. Now banks won’t mortgage his land – a band aid for a bullet hole.
Benzene, the slow-burning ghost of gasoline, was declared carcinogenic in Canada back in 1993. It lingers beneath the ground. It leaves its mark long after the station’s last tank was filled.
A week after Brad and his neighbours cleared the edges, something changed. The absentee landlord hired someone to clean up the surface. Not the soil. Just the surface. Enough to look respectable. Enough to say, “See? I’m doing something.”
When will Suncor unearth what it buried? The caps in the concrete remain, like grave markers—silent indicators of what lies beneath.
The land, and Brad, don’t forget.
Do you know what year the gas station closed? I always wondered what used to be in that empty lot.