$275,000 Fine Assessed Mobil Over Tank Law

Mobil Oil agreed Wednesday to pay $275,000 to settle civil charges alleging environmental violations at about half of its Orange County service stations.

The case is the fourth that Dist. Atty. Michael R. Capizzi has filed this year against a large oil company for failing to comply with California’s underground tank law, a major environmental regulation enacted to prevent fuel from leaking into ground-water supplies.

All of the county’s major gasoline suppliers have been put on notice that they are being investigated for violating the law, which required fuel tanks to be inspected and equipped with leak-detection systems by 1986.

“We have so many tanks involved with these major companies that it’s a potential serious threat to Orange County’s ground water,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Jerry Johnston said.

Mobil received warnings a number of times from the Orange County Health Care Agency that it had missed its September, 1986, deadline before the case was referred to the district attorney’s office, according to Bob Merryman, the county’s environmental health director.

The company was sued for alleged violations at 28 of its 52 stations in the county, including its Atwood bulk-storage facility in Anaheim. However, it has now brought all its Orange County stations into compliance, Johnston said.

“It has taken a long time to get their attention. But once Mobil realized that the district attorney was going to get involved, they moved to correct the problems,” Johnston added.

In the agreement approved Wednesday in Superior Court, Mobil paid a $250,000 civil fine to the district attorney’s office, plus $5,210 to the environmental health agency to cover the costs of the investigation, and $19,790 to purchase new computer equipment for the health department.

Jim Carbonetti, a spokesman for Mobil at its regional headquarters in Burbank, said the problems were mostly administrative oversights by the company. He said tanks had been regularly tested and many stations had leak-detection systems in place, but Mobil had failed to provide data to the health department.

“We had failed to oversee some of the administrative requirements,” he said. “This may have been a failure communication-wise of getting the information that the (health) department wanted into the right hands at Mobil.”

Mobil said in a statement that it would “aggressively pursue a vigorous and ongoing self-inspection program to avoid any similar oversights.”

Mobil’s statement also said that “in no instance” did the lawsuit contend “that any action or lack of action by Mobil resulted in a release to the environment.”

Merryman, however, said the lawsuit dealt only with Mobil’s compliance with the law, not actual fuel leaks. He said there are ongoing cleanups of fuel leaks at 42 of the 52 Mobil stations in Orange County. Those cleanups, he said, will be referred for legal action only if they don’t proceed quickly enough.

The fine is one of the largest ever collected for an environmental case in the county.

In January, Unocal paid $903,846 to settle a case involving tanks at 72 stations, about half of all its stations in Orange County. It was the largest single payment in any environmental case in county history.

Texaco paid $44,000 and Exxon paid $88,000 to settle similar cases earlier this year.