Underground Gas Tanks Target of Crackdown

The Ventura County Fire Department has violated by more than a year a state deadline to clean up the department’s leaking underground gasoline storage tanks.

The Fire Department, along with the U.S. Post Office and 273 others who own or operate underground tanks in the county, recently received letters from the county’s Environmental Health Department threatening prosecution.

The letters warn the violators that they must comply immediately with the law designed to protect the state’s underground drinking water, or face fines of up to $5,000 per day.

The Ventura County district attorney’s office, which will prosecute the cases, plans to pick several of the violators to use as examples, said Greg Brose, deputy district attorney for the consumer and environmental protection division.

“I don’t know how many cases we’ll begin with,” Brose said. “But we’re going to file enough cases to get other companies to understand that they will be next in line.”

At stake is the public health and the drinking water of future generations, one health department official said.

“Benzene, which is a component of gasoline, is a known carcinogen,” said Douglas Beach, manager of the county’s underground tanks program for Environmental Health. “Somewhere down the road if this is not taken care of, there is a good possibility that it will be in our drinking water.”

John McLaughlin, environmental health specialist for the county, said the county has not yet brought legal action against any violators of the law because of a staff shortage in the environmental health enforcement area.

“We’ve been extremely, probably too patient with them,” McLaughlin said.

McLaughlin said that as many as 75 of the 275 violators may actually have installed new tanks or monitoring systems and simply failed to notify the county. But he added that 200 operators out of compliance still represents one-third of the 590 operators of underground tanks countywide.

Describing the county’s enforcement problems, McLaughlin said that as few as one person at times has been assigned to the underground tanks program during the past year.

“We’ve had positions open for as long as six months at a time,” McLaughlin said. When he was the sole man working on the program, enforcement and inspections had to “take a back seat” to other business, he said.

Two men are now assigned full time to enforcing the law; one is in the field checking on the operators and the other in the office.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Brose said a poorly written county ordinance was also to blame for the delays in forcing compliance. The ordinance had to be rewritten last year, he said.

To date, no benzene or other harmful components of gasoline have been found in county drinking water, although gasoline from tanks has contaminated drinking water in other areas of the state, officials say.

The law, which is part of California’s Health and Safety Code, required all operators to install by Jan. 1, 1989, systems around existing tanks to detect leaks. Operators could also replace the antiquated single-walled tanks with tanks that have a second outside wall that would catch any accidental releases or leaks. A third option allows them to do monthly testing, but that process proves too costly over the long run, McLaughlin said.

The state is in the process of setting up a statewide data base on the program but had no current figures or estimates on compliance, the State Water Resources Control Board said.

In the city of Ventura, the only area in Ventura County that operates its own underground tank program, the compliance rate is 100%, said Brian Clark, who runs the program for the city Fire Department. Clark has 344 tanks within his jurisdiction and said that all operators are complying with the law.

Many of the owners and operators put off the replacements because they are costly, program officials said. A leak detection system can cost between $12,000 and $25,000. Cleanup of contaminated soil and water can run from $50,000 to $300,000 and more, McLaughlin said.

The County Fire Department, for example, has budgeted $389,000 for work this fiscal year, Fire Chief Rand-Scott Coggan said, and the work is far from over. He blamed the delay on a shortage of qualified contractors competent to do the work.

“Obviously we will need to keep budgeting more every year,” he said, adding that there is no projected completion date.

The county Fire Department had 22 gasoline tanks stored underground, which it used to fill fire engines and other equipment. Of those, six tanks have been removed, and only two of the projects completed, Coggan said. Three Thousand Oaks stations now must borrow gasoline from neighboring stations because their tanks have been dug up, but new ones not yet installed, Coggan said.

Coggan said the Fire Department itself has no direct role in hiring the contractors to replace its underground tanks. He said the projects are routed through the county’s Public Works Department, which hires the private contractors.

“We’re really just a customer in the program,” he said. “We can’t go out and do it ourselves. We are devoted to getting the tanks replaced. We don’t want to do any environmental damage, but we can only move as fast as the contractors.”

The short-term solution for the Fire Department may be to shut down its tanks altogether and start buying gasoline from private gas stations, Coggan said. The Rincon station near the Santa Barbara County line already does that, purchasing gasoline from a station in Carpinteria.

“That will cost the taxpayer more, but it is the most expedient means of getting the job done and into compliance,” Coggan said.

In addition to the troubles the Fire Department has run into in trying to comply with the law, private operators also complained this week about the high cost of compliance.

Shakar Khan, who operates the Mobil station at Oak Street and Thompson Boulevard in Ventura, estimated that the ongoing work to clean up the ground water his leaking tanks contaminated has cost $250,000. In addition, the station’s closure for seven months and 10 days has hurt business.

“People are used to go somewhere else now,” he said. “But we know the future is good here so we stay.”

In the Mobil case, in which the owners were four months beyond the deadline when the leak was detected, it was less ground water contamination than the danger of explosion that motivated the city to force a quick cleanup. Fumes from the hundreds of gallons of gasoline that leaked could have created enough pressure to blow up, City Inspector Brian Clark said.

“It’s happened in other areas of the country where there have been explosions in storm drains and basements,” he said.

None of the water near the Mobil station is used for drinking water and it ran through storm drains where it emptied out at the beach.

Assemblyman Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria) introduced legislation last week that would allow business owners, or whole counties, to form districts that would allow them to issue bonds to pay for cleanup costs up front. They would pay back the bonds over 30 years through assessment of district members.

That could give more business owners incentive to move ahead, O’Connell said.