What does an old oil refinery’s toll on a southeast Calgary community have in common with the province’s AI data centre boom?

A local documentarian said both have the potential to leave residents paying the price, and a scholar agreed that could be true.

As part of the Chinook Historical Society, Laura Combden will host a walk through Lynnview Ridge on the evening of Aug. 2 to educate attendees about the old Imperial Oil refinery and why she believes new technology could have a similar impact.

This will be the third walk Combden, a documentary filmmaker, has hosted on the topic. She has been researching the incident since 2019 as part of a project she is applying for grants to fund.

Combden said that when she started this journey, she noticed that the story of Lynnview Ridge had rarely been told from beginning to end. To learn more about what happened, she created a Facebook group to connect with former residents.

She has additionally drawn on documents and classical literature to inform her perspective. One constant that Combden said has remained, however, is the value in the firsthand accounts of those who once lived in Lynnview Ridge, which she said the walks have continued to offer. 

“I learn things from the community members, and you know what? That’s what was missing from my research when I first started this project,” she said.

“How can you tell a story that involves hundreds of people and not hear everyone’s story?”

Combden said the walk will discuss some of the ways refinery operations impacted the now “ghost town neighbourhood” and its inhabitants, including how neglected environmental damage caused feelings of injustice that serve as a warning for the future.

Looking back at Lynnview Ridge

In 1924, Imperial Oil opened its petroleum refinery southwest of the intersection of what is now Ogden Road and 50 Avenue SE, bordering the Bow River and the Beaverdam Flats park. 

For just over half a century, the refinery turned raw, unrefined energy sources into consumer and industrial petroleum products. Combden explained that the facility was also equipped with several disposal sites near the tanks, as well as a ravine dug to bury waste.

This was the case until the city purchased the main site to build Deerfoot Trail in 1975, thereby shutting down operations and demolishing the facility.

Shortly after, in the early 1980s, hundreds of homes were built atop the former tank farm on the upper escarpment, which became the Lynnview Ridge subdivision.

But in 2001, elevated levels of lead and hydrocarbon vapours were found in the soil. The next four years saw court action and 18 months of mediation between homeowners and Imperial Oil, who eventually signed a cleanup agreement.

The community was essentially dismantled from the inside out by the 2010s, as housing buyouts resulted in the demolition of 142 homes and several apartment blocks. After 1.5 metres of soil was removed, the site was declared clean and has sat empty since. 

This past spring, Imperial Oil confirmed that it is in the early stages of marketing the 29 acres of land for sale to a future developer — a discussion now underway among them, the City of Calgary, and Alberta Environment and Protected Areas.

While some residents have celebrated the idea of revitalizing the area, others have expressed discontent, citing the refinery’s long-term impacts on the neighbourhood’s environment.

New developments re-open old wounds

For some, the news of the contaminated soil did not come as a surprise. David Watson, who lived there in 1986, said in a comment on a post in the Before Lynwood Ridge group that he witnessed the contamination firsthand and reported it to environmental services.

“They came out, and I walked them around Beaverdam and showed them the ponds with the oil barrels and the sludge and the rainbow coloured liquid leaking into the river,” he wrote. 

“They did their visual-only assessment and said it was OK — not contaminated. They said the white coating was alkalide and was safe. They did not do any real environmental testing.”

Watson went on to say that many neighbours later experienced health problems from living in the area, despite there being no publicly confirmed cases.

“No one knows for sure if their health had been affected,” said Combden. 

“Many wondered, many presumed, many confidently stated it hadn’t been. But the stigma that comes with it and the emotional stress — that absolutely happened.”

No matter the technology, she said that each industry, including the new hot commodity that is AI, shares something in common: The unresearched, invisible harm that could come with toxic side effects for both people and the planet. 

“I fear AI data centres are now primed to become the new industry that we know very little about,” said Combden. 

“I mean, burying toxic waste and putting families over it will never end well. Just like assuming there will always be enough water, and that we can always clean that discharged water and feed that to humans.”

With new developments having recently been proposed in the area, coupled with the province’s expansion of data centres, she said that educating others about the incident is more important now than ever.

Alberta’s AI data centre boom

In recent years, the provincial government has taken strides to “establish Alberta as a global leader in the field of AI-driven data centre operations,” citing advantages such as the availability of natural gas, renewable energy, and a cold climate.

There are currently two AI data centre projects proposed for construction near Calgary: the Beacon Foothills Artificial Intelligence Hub, pitched for development near Aldersyde, Alta., and eStructure CAL-3, already underway in Rocky View County. 

Respectively, the projects are 60 km and 30 km away from the city centre — raising the question of the impact this could have on the environment and on the people living nearby. 

A February research article published in the Journal of Frontiers in Climate examined the implications associated with Virginia’s ‘data centre alley’ — the world’s largest concentration of data centres — to find that these pose a risk to the health of the land and humans nearby. 

Specifically, it determined that AI data centres require substantial resources to power and cool the facilities. The article explained that using more electricity and water increases greenhouse gas emissions and strains local water supplies.

This has been shown to pose a hazard to people, as long-term exposure to air pollution can lead to chronic disease and reproductive challenges. Additionally, many municipal water treatment plants aren’t equipped to filter out some of the chemicals used in data centres, raising the risk of waterborne diseases when discharged into residential systems. 

On the water scarcity side of things, the article noted that medium-sized data centres, around 15 megawatts, consume as much water as three hospitals or two 18-hole golf courses. The Beacon data centre hub, for example, is expected to generate 400 megawatts of power.

Despite these known consequences, a Mount Royal University sociology professor said corporations tend to install new technologies near residential areas regardless of the risks, and that this trend can also help explain what happened at Lynnview Ridge.

Why the history could be a cautionary tale

Tim Haney specializes in researching how people respond to crises following environmental and urban disasters. He echoed the point that living on contaminated land affects people in many ways, namely by increasing anxiety and shattering residents’ trust in authority.

Haney said that this is evident in some of the perspectives shared by former Lynnview Ridge residents online. He said that in the case of AI data centres, companies are tasked with buying the trust of locals, and they often do so by promising jobs and economic prosperity. 

This rings true in the Alberta context, as the province’s AI strategy pledges that investments will keep utility costs affordable for residents. Meanwhile, the Beacon hub, in particular, vows to create upwards of 300 jobs.

Historically, Haney said that industrial facilities have been able to fulfill these promises due to the physical labour required and decade-long operating time. He said that the same is unlikely to happen for AI data centres, as they are expected to be mostly self-sufficient. 

“On an ongoing basis, the data centres require and provide few full-time employees,” said Haney.

“So, when the community understands this, it becomes harder to sell.”

This, coupled with the known environmental impacts of data centres, could make it difficult for companies to win over communities, he said. Haney recommended that industry leaders put into action an idea that he explained as the precautionary principle. 

“It’s the idea that for public safety, new facilities and new technologies should be held back until there’s a body of evidence showing they are safe,” he said. 

“Industry tends to prefer the opposite approach — to open a new facility or introduce a new technology as early as possible, before the research has been fully done.”

For Combden, this tension is exactly why she believes Lynnview Ridge’s history deserves a wider audience. Without these conversations, she is worried that history could repeat itself on a much larger scale.