A lawsuit filed in B.C. Supreme Court touches on an issue that home buyers often overlook: ensuring that the property they are buying does not have contaminated soil or at least knowing if the property has an abandoned underground oil tank.
A Courtney woman is alleging that she had to pay an unspecified amount of money to remediate contaminated soil on her property and her neighbour's land because an underground oil tank on her property leaked hydrocarbons. She said she had no idea the tank existed.
Home buyers can often easily find out whether a prospective property has an underground oil tank by going to municipal websites.
The City of Vancouver's website, for example, has a page that educates the public on how to remove an underground oil tank and has a link so visitors can search city records for specific addresses.
Elaine Rose Gammon said in her Oct. 10 notice of civil claim that she learned in April, from a prospective home buyer, that the tank existed. She was trying to sell her property. She hired a firm to remove the tank and discovered that she was living on a contaminated site: at 618 14th Street in Courtenay. The neighbour's site, which also allegedly had contaminated soil was at 632 14th Street in Courtenay.
Both homes' contaminated soil was remediated, according to the lawsuit.
Gammon is suing the realtor who sold her the property, Brian Willis, and his Brian Willis Personal Real Estate Corp.
The property has a lengthy list of previous owners as it was sold frequently through the decades: in 1991, 1992, 1995 and 1999 before Gammon bought the home in 2020.
She is also suing those owners: Robert Wayne Townsend, Paline Lesley Townsend, Carole Marie Thompson, Lloyd Ernest Anderson, Brent Allan Morrison, Jamie Lynne Morrison and Lesley Anne Watts.
Those owners, she said, are "retroactively and jointly and separately liable for the costs of remediation" of her property and the neighbouring property.
Gammon alleges that Willis owed her fiduciary obligations and was supposed to be acting in her best interests.
He was "negligent" and failed, she said in her lawsuit, to advise her to inquire and search municipal records for oil tank removals, abandonments and installations.
No response to the notice of civil claim has yet been filed. BIV phoned Willis to get his side of the story and he said he had no comment.
None of the allegations have been proven in court.
