City to Hire More Inspectors for Storage Tanks

The city’s lagging effort to inspect thousands of underground storage tanks--many of them leaking--got a boost Tuesday from Mayor Tom Bradley, who announced plans to nearly double the Fire Department’s inspection staff.

“This is a serious threat. There are 15,000 of these underground storage tanks,” Bradley told a City Hall news conference. “They present a real danger to the community, and we are going to eliminate this danger.”

The mayor said he has asked the City Council for an interim appropriation of $440,000 to accelerate inspection and monitoring of underground tanks by increasing the tank-inspection staff from 13 to 25 as part of a three-year program.

The city has been responsible for inspecting and monitoring underground tanks since 1983, when the state Legislature required it. But, Bradley said, a three-year program started in the last fiscal year “fell behind” partially because of an “underestimation of work.”

Citing estimates based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency studies, Fire Chief Donald O. Manning said Tuesday that about 20% of the underground tanks in the city--holding a wide range of material ranging from gasoline and paint to “dirty” waste products--are leaking.

“The ones we are concerned about are those that are leaking and no one really knows that,” Manning said. “There are tanks out there . . . that have been put in illegally. One of our efforts is to discover and get those taken care of.”

The Fire Department started sending permit applications and tank-testing requirements to owners last May. And, starting July 1, inspectors began examining tanks and insisting on pressure tests.

Number in Compliance

So far, according to Assistant City Fire Chief Marshal Davis Parsons, about 2,400 underground tanks in the city are in compliance. Parsons blamed the seeming tardiness in enforcing the 1983 law on the time-consuming process of determining the scope of the tank problem, developing technology and finally getting the money and staff to deal with it.

When The Times surveyed local agencies statewide last summer, only about half of an estimated 142,000 underground storage tanks in California had been tested. Water officials in Southern California expressed fears that pollution from leaking tanks could one day limit the region’s “banking” of water in subterranean basins for dry years.

It was reported then that of the 725 tanks owned by Los Angeles itself, just 199 had been tested for leaks and 62 monitored. At the same time, Los Angeles County said that it oversees about 18,500 tanks in 80 cities and the unincorporated area and about 5,100 of that number had met its standards for testing and monitoring.

Up to this point, according to Parsons, the Los Angeles Fire Department has dealt mostly with tank owners who are complying voluntarily. Inspections were “cranked up” more in December, he said, even though no violators have yet been cited.

An inspector reported last March that a layer of jet fuel up to five feet thick had contaminated ground water beneath huge storage tanks at Los Angeles International Airport, and airport officials began an assessment of the problem. An airport spokesman Tuesday said a consultant has been retained to help devise a cleanup plan.

In April, state officials ordered a multimillion-dollar cleanup beneath the Chevron oil refinery in El Segundo, where studies estimated that up to 252 million gallons of fuel had leaked into ground water.