Lessons have been learned since Regina Beach explosion

“It’s gone. It’s literally — it’s at ground level, from what I’ve heard. Basically all the walls are gone and the roof is in the trees somewhere.”

It has been five years since Mark Oldershaw’s house in Regina Beach exploded.

The subsequent investigation determined that ground movement had caused an underground gas leak. The gas had entered Oldershaw’s home at the corner of First Street and Second Avenue and had been ignited, causing an explosion that destroyed his house and damaged a number of other buildings in the town.

It was Dec. 3, 2014.

“What we’ve learned since 2014 is there are areas where people may build, particularly in river valleys and along lakefronts, that we may not be able to serve,” said Dave Burdeniuk, SaskEnergy’s director of government and media releations.

“We had to take the very serious decision for customers in six communities along Last Mountain Lake, including areas of Regina Beach, that we had to remove our service from.

“We don’t like to make that decision. We don’t want to see customers inconvenienced — we don’t want to lose customers — but what we’ve learned from this is that there are zones within Last Mountain Lake that we just can’t serve.”

SaskEnergy took steps after the explosion to address the impact ground movement would have on its system. It upgraded lines, installed flexible components and set up measuring devices.

Burdeniuk said SaskEnergy’s standard practice when checking for leaks is to go through every neighbourhood in every area in the province once every four years. That means that, over a four-year cycle, crews have checked the entire system around Saskatchewan.

“But there are areas within the province that we have to monitor a lot closer,” Burdeniuk said. “There are neighbourhoods within Regina that we have to do surveys of every six weeks year-round. That doesn’t stop.”

Around Last Mountain Lake, crews continue to check for leaks, whether it’s technicians with handheld detectors or trucks with leak detection equipment. Landowners also are encouraged to check for cracks.

There’s also still an eye in the sky that monitors ground movement.

“Every 28 days, that satellite goes over Last Mountain Lake and that gives us a lot of data points,” said Burdeniuk, referring to a satellite service SaskEnergy started using in 2015. “We’ve got over 10,000 data points that we measure and we look for any variances where there may be some movement.”

Upgrades have been done around the province, but some areas simply can’t be helped due to soil conditions. As a result, SaskEnergy has had to cut off service to some of its customers.

That includes some of those around Last Mountain Lake, where the system could have required rebuilding every year or two because of the ground movement.

“That means it’s an area we probably shouldn’t be in, from not only the cost factor of having to do that but it’s an unacceptable risk of what movement like that could mean in possibly pulling lines apart and causing an underground leak where the gas is moving outside our pipeline system underground,” Burdeniuk said. “And we never want to see that.”

Numerous lawsuits were launched in the wake of the explosion in Regina Beach, but those have been settled.

Five years after the explosion, SaskEnergy is doing what it can to ensure that a similar incident doesn’t happen in the province.

“When we do have an occurrence like what happened at Regina Beach in 2014, the first thing we do is try to find ways to reduce any risk throughout our system but especially in areas where there is ground movement and slope movement,” Burdeniuk said.

“(We ask) ‘How do we reduce the risk and how do we do everything that we can to remove those factors so that we can make our services as safe as possible?’ ”