The old refinery site in Inglewood

The Inglewood Wildlands Park, from the 1930s-1980s was the site of an oil refinery, the only remains of which include a small brick shed and some power line supports. The rest of the land is reclaimed and has been allowed to revert to a natural state. It’s hard to image such a quiet serene place was the site of huge and dirty industrial plant. Quite the transformation.

Much effort has been put into cleaning up the site, located east of downtown, since the refinery closed. Even today though, the occasional oil slick is known to percolate up from the ground every now and then.

Why only one small part of the refinery’s infrastructure was left behind, when everything else was bulldozed, is anyone’s guess. The original owner of the plant was British American Oil, but post 1960 and until it closed in 1978 (it took well into the 1980s before it was completely dismantled) it belonged to Gulf Canada Resources.

While the story of this refinery could likely fill volumes, since there is so little of it left today, this short footnote seems oddly fitting and appropriate. I’d love to have written more though.

This Calgary neighbourhood was also the site of an old refinery…
Lynnview Ridge.

Short Subjects: reports that for any number of reasons are brief in nature. They might be updates to older articles, previews of posts not yet published, brief snippets of things that don’t fit in anywhere else or subjects that are so obscure that information on them can’t be found.

If you need any more information on what we talked about here, by all means contact us!

Date of adventure: September, 2014.
Location: Calgary, AB.

All that remains of the old refinery in Inglewood.

Inglewood Wildlands Park