The Quarry development has surpassed many people's expectations including the mayor and development company alike.

Cindy Casemore, Vice President Leasing and Legal for Springwood Development, shares,"we are thrilled with how fast this development has gained momentum. It has been a long go though; Springwood has been involved in this project for upwards of 14 years, with the remediation taking up a bulk of that, but once we got that sorted out and the remediation work complete, the development just took off from there."

From 2015 into 2016, Springwood had five buildings including the Canadian Tire; last year the company sealed the deal with Garmin.Today a couple more buildings including Garmin's new home are currently underway.

"There are major recognized businesses that all report they are doing really well and they are pleased with the Cochrane market."

Looking back at the beginning of the project, Casemore, says the company had to do a lot of research and get creative with how to remediate and develop the site. From 1964 to 1988, Domtar operated a wood treatment facility on the land where the Quarry sits.

"First and foremost we had to look at an economical and viable way of remediating the site. The typical way is to dig up all the contaminated soul, take it off site to a government approved dump site and dump it and then buy new fill and you replace all the contaminated material with clean materiel. That is an extremely expensive process. When you look at it as a whole, you aren't making the environment any cleaner you are just taking it from somewhere where it's not allowed to be to somewhere it's allowed to be."

Springwood assembled a group of environmental experts, including Worley Parsons and Biogenie, to perform site assessments and create a detailed remediation action plan. Springwood's environmental team worked closely with Alberta Environment, Calgary Health Region, and the Town of Cochrane in developing the remediation strategy, ensuring that all regulators' needs were met.

The remediation strategy involved excavating and processing the soil on-site, and sorting between clean and dirty. The clean material was beneficially reused. The contaminated soil was biostabilized and placed back."We added bacteria, water, and oxygen to the soil in a specific manner that they created and that Alberta Environment approved. It cleaned the soil and neutralized any contaminants; so the soils stayed we didn't actually take any contaminated soil and put it anywhere else."

What started off as a calculated risk and hope 14 years ago, Springwood and the Quarry development are now thriving.

"It was the vision of our founder Bill Butler and his partners at the time; they looked at Cochrane, they said it's growing, a strong market. They worked with, had the backing, and support of the town and everybody had to have the same vision that this was possible, viable, and work together to get it done. A lot of consultants, a lot of years of working with Alberta and Environment and various stakeholders and the staying power of Springwood to see it through. There was a lot of years where there wasn't a lot of progress or we ran into roadblocks that you didn't foresee and overcame those to get to where we are now."

Looking back at the 45 acre contaminated site, it has been an incredible feat. What was once an eye sore is now a hub of activity with less than 5 acres left to be developed.