Imperial Oil company is involved in a project to improve the soil conditions of some land it owns in Portage la Prairie to prepare the property for sale.

Work on the project at the property located just west of Third Street NE, north of the railway track, is expected to take about two weeks and will start on Monday.

The land Imperial Oil owns is about 120 feet X 200 feet in size, located at the site of the former Imperial Oil fertilizer facility.

"It would have sold bulk-fertilizer there," said spokesman Jon Harding with Imperial Oil out of Calgary. "We did not have a petroleum storage facility at the site. It was from the 1960s."

The site closed and was dismantled sometime in the early to mid 2000s.

"Whenever we close an operating site and we dismantle it, the next step is we do an environmental assessment," said Harding. "It's standard practice. Then, it becomes a non-operating surplus property."

Manitoba Conservation requires a piece of property to meet certain environmental standards before it can be sold to another buyer.

Harding said the work, which will start next week, is a soil-removal project and is part of the company's land remediation program.

Any soil found to be contaminated or not up to the standard will be removed from the site as part of the clean up project.

"We will be taking away some soil and replacing it with clean back-fill," Harding said. "That work should take a couple of weeks."

After the work is completed, Imperial Oil will continue to monitor the property.

“All of our assessment results so far show that the property poses no risk to human health,” added Harding.

When the property’s environmental condition meets the Manitoba Conservation property standards, it can then be sold to another party.

Selling property

"Our goal is to get it there (to meet the necessary standards) and to market it for sale," said Harding. "At this point, we are still doing remediation. We haven't marketed the property for sale yet. That's our goal."

angela.brown@sunmedia.ca