By paNOW

Co-op readies former gas station for demolition

Apr 28, 2014 | 11:50 AM

By the end of the week, there will be nothing standing in the lot of the now-closed Co-op gas station at Second Avenue West and 16th Street West.

Later this week, Co-op plans to have the gas bar’s canopy and the convenience store at the site demolished. Then, they’ll start removing the petroleum infrastructure.

“All the old tanks will come out, everything will get dug up and we’ll be putting [in an] all new canopy, all new pumps,” said Dave Hudak with the Prince Albert Co-op.

Co-op is working on a plan to rebuild the service station, and it has already built its new touchless car wash near the existing site. The new convenience store will be 3,600 square feet, Hudak said.

The new convenience store is already standing, but crews are working on the inside of the building and will start working on the finishing touches.

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But the gas bar won’t be expanding – the number of pumps will remain the same, according to Hudak, adding that “for the first time on this site, it’s going to switch to a full-serve site.”

The gas station, once finished will have “state of the art” technology for monitoring, he said.

However, the construction project itself did yield interesting finds.

Hudak said that when crews tore down the old car wash to make room for the new store, they ended up unearthing three old basements, and found tractor equipment.
“We even found a Model T [Ford] steering column in the ground,” he said. 

Co-op plans to open up the new store in late August or early September. 

The decommissioned site was the staging grounds for the Prince Albert Fire Department’s training exercises this past weekend. A battalion chief with the fire department said that using buildings like these to train gives the firefighters more realistic conditions to train in.

tjames@panow.com

On Twitter: @thiajames