Town receives good news about CN spill, software

The diesel fuel leak along the CN Rail property near Central Avenue appears to be substantially less than originally estimated, town council learned Monday night.
A delegation from the KGS Group, which was hired by CN Rail to clean up the diesel, was at the meeting, along with Central Avenue residents affected by the leak.
KGS spokesperson Kimber Osiowy said the original estimates of more than 220,000 L of diesel fuel quite likely are too high. So far, only 100 L have been collected over the past year.
“It’s not very much, that’s for sure. You could look at it as being good news that there isn’t as much in the ground as we thought,” he remarked.
Osiowy said most of the soil in the area is clay, which does not hold the pollutants. The sand content throughout the area is found only in thin layers, and remnants of the leak are found in those sand streams.
“We found thin sand streams and that’s were the oil is being held. The volume of oil is not very great,” said Osiowy.
A new estimate won’t be available until late April when the soil has completely thawed.
KGS has built three recovery trenches and a well-water separator building to clean up the area.
In other news, council also received a report Monday night that the town’s software problems are coming to an end.
“I’m happy to report we seem to have gotten through the worst of it now that the property tax program, in particular, is now functioning,” Administration and Finance minister Darryl Allan told council.
“We’ve seen the end of the biggest problems,” he said.
The town had to delay tax bills in February because of problems with the year 2000 updates on the software.
But Allan added there still are some concerns and suggested the town consider a number of proposals for the future.
“We are currently the only Ontario municipal customer [using this software], which means we have some concerns about the ongoing development of the product,” said Allan.
The options the town has are either to wait and see how the new company does with the product, look for another company to manage the software, or hire a programmer to work on the software in the Civic Centre on a regular basis.
“We’ve made a lot of progress but we still can see were there’s going to be some problems,” Allan warned.