Officials Seek to Prevent Work on Fallout Shelter After Leak

Health officials said Tuesday that they will ask a judge to order a religious sect to halt construction on a fallout shelter where 31,000 gallons of fuel has leaked from buried tanks.

David Niss, an attorney with the Health and Environmental Sciences Department, said after a meeting in Helena with Gov. Stan Stephens and state regulators that the state will seek a court order this week.

The diesel fuel and gasoline leaked from three of 35 buried tanks at the fallout shelter complex of the Church Universal and Triumphant, a religious sect that warns of the possibility of imminent catastrophe.

Niss said the court order would cover the main shelter complex at Corwin Springs, five miles north of Yellowstone National Park, and about 45 smaller fallout shelters at the church-owned subdivision of Glastonbury near Emigrant, Mont., about 20 miles to the north.

He said the state also will issue an order requiring the church to empty, remove and inspect all 35 underground storage tanks at the Corwin Springs site.

The order will direct the church to turn over all information on how the storage tanks were installed, Niss said.

Officials have said they believe that burying the tanks during the winter resulted in ruptures after the frozen ground began to thaw and shift.

The spill brought members of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency emergency response team from Denver and Helena to monitor the cleanup at the church’s headquarters on a mountain ranch on the northern boundary of the nation’s oldest national park.

But state fisheries experts said Tuesday that Mol Heron Creek, an important spawning area for Yellowstone cutthroat trout, apparently has escaped long-term damage so far.

Only a small amount of diesel fuel reached the stream last Friday and since then no new traces have been found in the water, said Glenn Phillips, pollution control biologist for the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks.