Absolutely. Thank you for the opportunity. I didn't have enough time to fit that into my testimony.
Ontario alone has 26,000—that we know of—abandoned gas wells. That doesn't mean all of them are leaking or are erupting, but it does mean that we don't know when they're going to leak and to erupt. Norfolk County is home to 2,600 with one leaking gas well right now in our community that has cost us over $1 million. With an all-hands-on-deck approach, with all our staff, from our health unit to our operations and roads team, trying to manage hydrogen sulphide and a leaking gas well, we've had to evacuate community members. We're ill-equipped to handle this with our finances and resources.
What I hear from our provincial partners is that, for the federal government's additional funding to the provincial partners, to make its way down to the municipalities, it would go a long way. I think we're going to see this as a really systemic, deep-seated issue in all of Ontario—I can't speak to outside of Ontario—in the coming years. We know we have 2,600 in Norfolk County alone, and one gas well with over $1 million.
There are a lot of health and safety risks, and our EMS team isn't equipped to respond either. We don't have in-house monitoring to determine if it's a high-risk area, and if we need to be evacuating our residents. Is it something our fire department deals with? Is it something the health unit deals with? It's a big issue, and I think we're going to hear about it a lot in the coming years.