VANCOUVER - As Canadian cities grow further and further into their outskirts, once far-flung industrial sites are now snuggled up with new residential neighbours and as last week's pipeline rupture near Vancouver shows, co-existence is sometimes uneasy.
Urbanization has meant some industries shut down and move, the land reclaimed for more homes.
But often, industry simply settles into the groove of a neighbourhood.
Until something goes wrong.
"It's certainly a national problem," says Burnaby city councillor Garth Evans. "It's not confined to Burnaby, that's for sure."
Calgary and Edmonton in particular struggle with the issue, but it's a concern in most big cities, experts say.
Burnaby, a city of 202,000, made national headlines last Tuesday when an excavator working on a new sewer line punctured the 60-centimetre TransMountain pipeline that moves Alberta crude oil from a nearby storage facility to an export loading terminal on Burrard Inlet.
The line gushed oil four storeys into the air for half an hour, covering cars, homes, gardens and streets.
Pipeline operator Kinder Morgan Canada estimated about 10 large tanker trucks full of oil were spewed before the line was shut off.
No one was hurt but oil found its way into the inlet, blackening the shoreline and coating several birds.
Cleanup will take some time and cost millions of dollars. Fifty homes and yards were damaged, 11 of them seriously, and restoration will involve denuding the yards of trees, plants and even the top layer of soil.
Several investigations are looking at what went wrong.
Evans, a lawyer whose work includes environmental cases, said burgeoning cities are always running the risk of tripping over their potentially dangerous industrial underpinnings.
"We might be the worst in the Lower Mainland but there are many of them," he said.
Indeed, Evans used to live across the inlet in North Vancouver, where industry - including a plant that produces potentially toxic chlorine for the pulp mills - dots the shoreline near increasingly dense housing.
He sat on a committee 25 years ago that recommended moving the chlorine plant.
It's still there.
"That's certainly a disaster looking for a place to happen," said Evans.
The damaged Burnaby pipeline and tank farm were built in 1953 to supply the export terminal and neighbouring refinery, which was built in 1935, long before the city grew around it.
"I'll just bet you that most of those people didn't even know there was a pipeline under the road in front of their houses," said Evans. "I bet it came as a complete shock."
Nowhere is the fault line between industrial and residential land use more evident than in Alberta.
The booming petroleum industry has fuelled the growth of Calgary and Edmonton, both now boasting metropolitan populations of more than a million people.
Both cities are also in active oil and gas production zones, as well as having processing facilities.
In 1999, Hub Oil's 60-year-old recycling plant in southeast Calgary exploded, killing two workers and forcing the evacuation of 1,500 nearby residents.
A toxic cloud hung over the city for hours and when evacuees returned, they found their homes covered in oil, dust and debris from the blast.
Residents have pushed since the 1980s for the plant to be moved but Hub balked at the cost.
The problem Alberta cities now wrestle with most is pressure from energy companies to keep their urban oil and gas reserves in production.
Permits are issued by the provincial Energy and Utilities Board as long as producers ensure safety measures are in place.
Municipalities may be kept in the loop but can't block a project, said Kevan van Velzen, Calgary's manager of environmental assessment and liability.
"Does that conflict with the city's interest? Absolutely," he said.
The problem crystalized a couple of years ago when Compton Petroleum of Calgary applied to drill a sour gas well about 1.5 kilometres from the city's southeastern outskirts.
A lot of natural gas in southern Alberta is sour or hydrogen sulphide gas. It is deadly in minute quantities and wells are subject to heightened safeguards in case of a blowout, including automatic flaring and shutoff mechanisms.
The Compton well's setback - the safety area covered by any emergency blowout plan - would have affected 200,000 Calgary residents.
"The city had quite a concern," said van Velzen.
The province approved the well, which so far hasn't been drilled.
The situation spurred creation of an internal city working group to look at the implications of residential growth and the conflict with resource exploitation.
The group is also compiling an updated database of all existing and abandoned pipelines and wells within the city to ensure property developers have the most accurate information.
Edmonton set up a task force whose recommendations now are before city council to deal with the issue.
The city has about two dozen producing wells in the city and others that are permanently capped or simply suspended until it's feasible to put them back into production.
"The oil company that owns the lease can go back there and start operating that well any time it feels like it," said task-force member Tom Olenuk of the Alberta Environmental Network.
Both he and van Velzen say that while provincial regulations are strict, enforcement doesn't always measure up.
Among the horror stories the Edmonton panel heard: a businessman who built a warehouse on top of an active natural gas pipeline, despite signs warning it was there, and a homeowner whose new garage rests on a capped oil well.
Olenuk said to his knowledge neither building has been ordered removed.
In Strathcona County, an Edmonton suburb of about 80,000 people, local government is trying to make the province understand this isn't bucolic countryside anymore.
"What may look like a rural area on a large-scale map really is kind of suburbia," said Mike MacGarva, county engineering and planning manager.
Like Calgary, Stratcona tries to tackle the problem through longer-term planning and looking for compromises with the energy sector.
"But sometimes some hard choices have to be made where you just have to say No," he says.
Back in Burnaby, Evans knows that on cost alone it's unrealistic to relocate the oil refinery, tank farm and pipelines, even if some other jurisdiction wanted them.
Removing the homes most under threat would also cost millions.
Alternatives include increasing the buffer zones around the facilities, enforcing higher safety standards - though he admits they're already very stringent - and ensuring residents know who their neighbours are.
"You can reduce risk from industrial activity, you can't eliminate it," he says. "Bad things happen."
