Almost immediately after the pump was turned on at PW-1, people knew something was wrong. Local residents complained that their drinking water smelled strange, like lighter fluid. After fielding numerous complaints, the pump was shut off in the fall of 1981.

At the time, Production Well Number One was one of four drinking-water wells operated by the City of Grand Forks and had recently been deepened to increase capacity. Even with its expansion, PW-1 remained the smallest of the wells, a fortunate coincidence given that the city is located in the arid Kettle River Valley, where water is at a premium. Nevertheless, PW-1's loss meant Grand Forks lost 10 percent of its available drinking water, putting a real crimp on supply.

Several months later, on May 19, 1982, PW-1 was brought back on-line. The lights at the City Hall switchboard lit up again. Caller after caller made similar complaints. The water had a weird smell and taste, as if it was contaminated with gasoline. For the second time in half a year, PW-1's pump was switched off. Shortly after, city and provincial environmental officials began investigating how suspected toxins had made their way into Grand Forks' water supply.

Twenty-three years later, the events at PW-1 loom large in a dispute pitting a half-dozen small businesses in Grand Forks against Chevron Canada-a dispute that is of interest to property owners elsewhere in B.C. who are dealing with the sorry environmental legacy of leaking underground fuel tanks. Questions are being asked about why the provincial government-regulator of hazardous wastes-failed to ensure that the ground around PW-1 was detoxified before the pollutants wormed their way into the ground beneath area businesses. And questions are also being asked about recent changes to provincial environmental legislation, changes that may put public health at increased risk.

"The thing that really bothers us is that this came to light in 1981," says Kim Nielsen, who along with her husband, Tonni, owns a property near the former well. "The city well to the west of the Chevron station was contaminated and Chevron drilled a new well for the city. So the city got their well and their money. But the province didn't say anything to anybody else in the area. It just seemed to die after that."

For more than 20 years, in fact, the issue was moribund. But all that changed last year when the Nielsens decided to put the property they had purchased 13 years earlier for $70,000 up for sale. When a prospective buyer arrived, they learned they had a problem. Before getting a bank loan, the buyer was told the lender needed an environmental assessment of the property. The assessment, which cost the Nielsens $5,000, was essentially an historical overview of the business property and surrounding area. And it turned up details of the earlier events at PW-1 and contamination of the surrounding aquifer.

Not only did the report scuttle a $155,000 sale, but also it forced the Nielsens to spend $15,000 on a more detailed environmental study. Ironically, the company they chose, Golder Associates Ltd., previously worked for Chevron when problems at PW-1 surfaced. In order to establish whether or not the Nielsen property was contaminated, Golder sank three test wells. Water tests at two of the wells turned up unacceptable levels of hydrocarbons and metals exceeding Canadian health and safety standards. According to Golder, the toxins came from off site. The most likely sources were the Chevron station, a former Texaco station (Texaco is now owned by Chevron, part of a business empire that last year reported net income of $13.3 billion), two other properties where gasoline pumps were once located, and a former fuel tank on a property where a self-storage business now operates.

The Nielsens, who, along with a handful of other local business owners, have hired Vancouver environmental lawyer Wally Braul, recently proposed that Chevron and they exchange whatever information they each had on the Grand Forks pollution plume. Chevron's lawyers turned down the request in mid May.

Coincidentally, questions about multiple pollution points confronted City of Grand Forks and provincial Ministry of Environment officials in 1982 when they investigated what had contaminated PW-1's water. Notes on that investigation are included in a 1988 report by Piteau Associates Engineering Ltd., which was hired by a Vancouver law firm acting for the City of Grand Forks.

In July 1982, Marc Zubel, a ground-water expert with the Ministry of Environment, came to Grand Forks from Victoria. Within 10 minutes of resetting the pump at PW-1, Zubel turned on a nearby faucet and immediately detected "a faint smell, reminiscent of lighter fluid". Zubel ordered water tests, which turned up hydrocarbons that were clearly moving in the ground water and had either come from some nearby bulk gasoline storage tanks that had earlier been decommissioned or two gas stations.

Further tests in 1987 by Piteau identified the Chevron station as "the most likely source" of the contamination. At three of seven test wells drilled, Piteau detected a marked petroleumlike odour and dark, discoloured soils. Significantly, the three holes ran in a line running away from where an old, 5,000-gallon, rusted-metal underground fuel tank was removed by Chevron. The second hole was opposite PW-1, the third toward the Texaco station. The line paralleled the underlying aquifer's ground-water flow.

Chevron later paid the city for a new well, pump, and other equipment, along with an undisclosed amount of cash. A November 28, 1990, letter to the city from Roger Kestell, Chevron Canada's vice-president of marketing, suggests the cash payment could be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. (In the letter, Kestell wrote that it was "acceptable" to calculate the interest alone at $55,000, and he also offered to increase Chevron's "bottom line" offer of a month earlier by $15,000.)

Chevron Canada spokesperson Deidre Reid declined to comment on the settlement, citing confidentiality. "We would not be able to disclose exact numbers." As for whether or not groundwater and soil continues to be degraded in Grand Forks, Reid said "three sites of potential contamination" might explain any ongoing problems.

She said Chevron previously dealt with off-site contamination from its Grand Forks station by hiring consultants to devise a cleanup plan. The plan consisted of placing "soil vapour extraction equipment" both on and off the gas-station property. The equipment uses air to suck up vapours. But, according to Braul, that "has little if any effect on cleaning up the plume of pollution that has left the property".

Beyond the use of the vapour extractors, Reid said "accredited professionals" advised that the best treatment option was "natural attenuation".

Natural attenuation is essentially a euphemism for doing nothing. Over time, air and bacteria in the soil will break down the hydrocarbons in the contaminated soil, making it less toxic. The critical issue for property owners is just how much time is involved. If the pollution is extensive, it may take decades to be rendered harmless.

This fact appears to have been much on the mind of provincial Ministry of Environment staff in 2000, when they considered a natural-attenuation cleanup plan submitted by Imperial Oil. At issue was an extensive pollution plume from a gas station Imperial owned in the Village of Salmo (Imperial is part of oil giant Exxon Mobil, which reported 2004 net income of $25.3 billion). The ministry was prepared to accept the plan. But not, as British Columbia's Supreme Court later heard, without tying its approval to Imperial first compensating several local residents whose properties were damaged by the plume.

Imperial argued in court that the ministry's position on compensating property owners was "irrelevant" to approving the company's cleanup plan. Not only did the court agree, but also it ordered the province to pay Imperial almost $240,000 extra in legal fees.

Several months after that decision, Imperial purchased three local properties affected by the pollution plume for an undisclosed amount of money. One of the properties, a café, had been in disrepair for years, its owner unable to obtain loans to upgrade it because of the liability associated with the pollution. The café was subsequently bulldozed and the property fenced in. The other two properties were leased back to the Village of Salmo, which now collects rent from the occupants. The settlement ended a bitter five-year battle, during which property owners were told the assessed value of their land was, in some cases, $1.

Other landowners similarly affected by gas-station pollution may not be so lucky, however. Faced with delays, they may be forced to live either with a cloud of liability hanging over their properties or elect to pay for their land to be cleaned up and seek to recover costs in court. If the subsequent lawsuit fails, they pay twice: once for the cleanup and once for their lawyers.

Back in Grand Forks, the Nielsens and others hope for a different outcome but know that they face an uphill battle. Their hope rests on the fact that the provincial government has yet to produce anything showing it approved a cleanup plan, even though provincial environment officials knew 23 years ago that there was a problem in the community.

In addition, the 1988 Piteau report proposed a detailed cleanup plan for the wider area. That report said that the contaminated aquifer required "biorestoration"-in this case, a process that involved pumping nutrients and bacteria into the earth for a period of between one and five years at a cost of $300,000 to $1 million in 1987 dollars. This would turn the hydrocarbons into a less soluble form, including gases, and would help slow the flow of toxins to surrounding properties.

"If Chevron and the ministry agreed that natural attenuation would work, then they should provide us with a certificate of compliance for the site, indicating that this site has been properly remediated," Braul told the Georgia Straight. "My clients have good reason to believe that no approval in principle or certificate could be justified in these circumstances and that, in fact, they don't exist.

"Natural attenuation should be used very selectively and very carefully and only in circumstances where local residents aren't impacted. This is not one of those circumstances," Braul added.

Don Vergamini, a contaminated-sites officer with the Ministry of Water, Land and Air Protection in Kamloops, confirmed to the Straight that a review of ministry files shows that the documents Braul refers to don't exist. However, at a meeting between ministry and company officials in 1995, Vergamini said, Chevron felt it had cleaned up all the "free product" it could and that any remaining pollutants would, over time, be rendered benign. The ministry essentially concurred. "I don't think there was much follow-up after the meeting in '95, when they said the pollutants would naturally attenuate," Vergamini said. He added that if the government concluded today that the environment or human health were at risk in Grand Forks, it could still step in and issue a cleanup order.

Across B.C., hundreds if not thousands of people live close to gas stations where underground metal fuel tanks were in use for decades, tanks that are known to corrode and leak. Although most metal tanks have been replaced with more durable double-hulled fibreglass units, pollution problems similar to those in Grand Forks and Salmo exist in numerous communities across the province.

More disturbing, Braul says, is that recent changes to provincial laws may place public interests at further risk. The changes came following a "contaminated sites review" initiated by the Liberals after their successful 2001 election campaign. The review triggered new legislation, the Environmental Management Act, which replaced the earlier Waste Management Act. Under the new act, approved professionals from the private sector, as opposed to public servants, are increasingly relied on to look at contaminated sites or properties that might be designated as such and to play a bigger role in designing cleanup plans for them.

Braul, who drafted B.C.'s original contaminated-sites regulations, and who is advising a panel of registered professionals who will be affected by the new act, says the changes have environmental experts in the private sector concerned. Although public servants are protected from prosecution by statutory immunity, professionals in the private sector are not. "We rely heavily on approved professionals already," Braul says, "and that could spell trouble if there's not adequate liability protection and affordable insurance products. Without that, there will be reluctance on the part of approved professionals to offer services and the system could grind to a halt."

From the perspective of Kim and Tonni Nielsen, however, it seems things came to a halt a long time ago. Today, they live with the consequences. Twenty-three years after the province learned of events at PW-1, they are stuck with a business they can't sell, a company cleanup plan that consists of doing nothing, and a public regulator that seems oddly indifferent to an environmental problem two decades in the making.