- Leaking underground storage tanks remain a major cause of groundwater contamination after more than 500,000 have been cleaned up.
- According to the most recent Environmental Protection Agency data, roughly 81 million people live within a quarter mile of an underground storage tank that has experienced at least one leak.
- Nearly half of Americans rely on groundwater for their drinking water, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and experts say even a pinhole in an underground tank the size of a pin could allow 400 gallons of fuel to leak into the ground each year.
For more than a decade, some residents of Canove Park, a small neighborhood in Richmond, Rhode Island, have been drinking and bathing in tap water contaminated by gasoline that leaked from storage tanks buried underground at a gas station a few hundred yards from their homes. For years, they fought the oil companies, endured the daily pain of having to boil most of their water, and worried about permanent damage to themselves and their children.
The Canove Park disaster sparked a national outcry in the 1980s calling for the cleanup and regulation of thousands of underground tanks storing oil, heating oil and other hazardous chemicals across the U.S. The program continues today and remains a major source of groundwater contamination even after more than 500,000 tanks have been cleaned up.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly half of Americans rely on groundwater for their drinking water, and it’s not just well water that’s under threat. City water is treated and processed to meet federal standards, but it can still pick up contaminants from gas leaks on its way to your tap. In some cases, this can happen if the source is an unregulated well (some cities get their drinking water from a mix of surface and groundwater) or if a pipe is broken.
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For privately owned wells that are not regulated by the government, water treatment and filtration is the homeowner’s responsibility.
How does a leak happen?
Environmental experts say even a pinprick hole in an underground tank could allow 400 gallons of fuel to leak into the ground annually, contaminating soil and water. Spills can destroy habitats and kill wildlife. About 81 million people live within a quarter mile of an underground storage tank that has leaked at least once, according to the latest EPA data.
Most of the tanks from the mid-1980s were made from steel, which will likely corrode over time. Modern tanks are made from fiberglass, which is more corrosion-resistant, but sooner or later all of them will leak, said Dr. Kelly Pennell, professor of environmental engineering and water resources at the University of Kentucky. The cylindrical tanks typically hold tens of thousands of gallons of fuel.
Workers remove a 10,000-gallon underground gasoline storage tank and replace it with a new tank at a gas station in Sacramento, California, on May 23, 2003. Environmental experts say even a pinprick hole in the underground tank could allow 400 gallons of fuel to leak into the ground a year, contaminating soil and water. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli, File)
Detecting leaks isn’t easy, she said.
“If a gas station has been in business for 10 or 15 years, these little leaks may go undetected,” Pennell said. “They’re not leaking 1,000 gallons a day. They’re just leaking a little bit. But over time, that becomes a problem.”
The leak creates a chemical plume that can travel through groundwater, turn into steam, and rise from cracks in the foundations of homes and businesses. The plume can contain cancer-causing chemicals, including benzene, a component of gasoline, and pose a fire and explosion hazard. When the contamination was found at Kanobu Park, the local fire chief took drinking water samples at one of the gas stations and said it was “nearly combustible.”
Cleaning up groundwater contamination is costly, said Ann Rabe, environmental policy director at the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit that focuses on environmental issues such as leaking underground storage tanks.
“A thorough inspection must be conducted to determine when an underground storage tank is leaking and immediate action must be taken; otherwise the leak will grow larger each week and repair costs will increase,” Rabe said.
More than 516,000 leaks have been cleaned up since Congress directed the EPA to begin regulating underground tanks in 1984, but more than 57,000 known sites are still awaiting full cleanup, the EPA said.
Cleaning fee
According to the Association of State and Territorial Solid Waste Management Officials, an organization that serves as the EPA’s liaison with state and territorial leaking underground storage tank programs, the average cost to clean up a site is $154,000, although the cost can be significantly higher or lower depending on the amount of work that needs to be done.
Tank owners are supposed to buy insurance and pay for cleanup, but they don’t always do so. A gas tax-financed trust fund helps; it currently has about $1.5 billion. But the program costs the state and federal governments about $1 billion a year in extra funding.
According to the EPA, underground storage tank leaks occur in nearly every town in the United States, but the people who live closest to these facilities tend to be low-income and have higher proportions of minorities.
The EPA requires that owners and operators of underground storage tanks install approved leak detection equipment and regularly test these systems. But these systems are not foolproof. There are many different types of systems, and each type can miss a leak or its size. Although industry groups suggest building systems that use multiple leak detection methods, this is not always the case, and the method chosen may not be optimal for a particular tank. Also, owners may not properly maintain the systems.
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The EPA estimated in 2015 that complying with the regulations would cost tank owners and operators a total of $160 million a year, or about $715 per facility per year. But it would mean less taxpayer money needed for cleanup, the EPA said.
Some of the land cleaned up since the program’s inception has been funded through federal and state brownfield programs, which encourage the cleanup and reuse of contaminated or potentially contaminated land.
The EPA announced a historic $315 million investment in brownfield projects last year, with most of that funding coming from a bipartisan infrastructure deal that President Joe Biden signed into law more than two years ago.
