Reclaimation Site

During the past winter, I was doing some work in the Hermitage area on the North side of the Yellowhead. When you are driving the Yellowhead along this stretch, the view of this area is actually blocked by the railway tracks because the tracks sit on a berm above the elevation of the highway.

On the North side of the tracks however, there is a small neigbourhood that dead-ends at a large fence that surrounds an even larger piece of empty land. Having worked along the fence line, I came across a sign hanging on the fence that stated the land was in some kind of a remedial program and that it should not be trespassed upon in order for the testing to be completed accurately. The land apparently belongs to a company called Domtar and I am assuming it is related to the paper manufacturing company. The sign on the fence looked like it had been there for a long time.



On my side of the property and still behind the fence, there were a couple of large wooden poles holding up a platform full of electrical transformers. There were also some very old outdoor light fixtures attached to those poles. No wiring was leading off the poles into the site but wiring was leading to them from a public line on the outside of the fence. It is a fairly large chunk of land and it sits right in the middle of urban sprawl. I would only take a guess that this land had held industry or a manufacturing plant on it at some point in the past and now sits vacant and somewhat contaminated. I searched for info about the property briefly but couldn't find anything significant about it.