Cutback in Cleanup of Leaky Gas Station Tanks Criticized

A sharp cutback in one of the state’s biggest environmental programs has gratified gas station owners but angered some water quality regulators, who say they are being forced to shut down cleanups around leaking underground gas tanks without proper review.

Several environmental technicians with the state’s water agency have protested that their bosses and appointees of Gov. Pete Wilson are pushing them to put an immediate end to one-quarter of the cleanups in the Los Angeles-Ventura region.

Up to 600 of the 2,400 underground tank cleanups in those counties are scheduled to be terminated in the next four months, compared to only 100 underground cleanups that were shut down in all of 1995. Some cases are getting as little as 30 minutes of review before they are closed, the workers complained.

“It’s just irresponsible,” said one technician who has been reviewing the cases at the water board’s Monterey Park offices. “The potential for ground water contamination increases and nobody is going to be held responsible. It won’t be tomorrow or the next day, but it’s a potential slow degradation.”

Officials in Sacramento who urged the scaling back of the program insist that contamination is only being left in the ground in limited concentrations and where it poses no threat to drinking water deposits.

“The chance of making a mistake that impacts water quality is pretty minimal,” said James Giannopoulos, who is overseeing the underground tank program for the state Regional Water Quality Control Board. “There is a significant positive impact on people whose cases are closed. It removes a cloud on the title of their property that makes it difficult to make any kind of transaction.”

Controversy around the tank cleanups has been intense for years, but it peaked in December, when Wilson’s administration announced that the majority of more than 20,000 contaminated sites statewide probably would not have to be actively cleaned after removal of leaking tanks.

State water officials pointed to a study by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to justify the slowdown of the far-reaching environmental repair. The study concluded that most highly toxic hydrocarbons degrade naturally in the soil, or when treated with oxygen and bacteria. The researchers suggested that traditional cleanups--which included massive soil removal and costs of $150,000 to $300,000--would no longer be needed in many cases.

The head of the state water agency suggested in a memorandum that leaking tanks more than 250 feet from drinking water wells simply could be monitored but not actively cleaned up.

After that memo, officials at the Water Resources Control Board in Sacramento said they have continued to receive complaints from gas station owners and others that the Los Angeles region--which covers most of Los Angeles and Ventura counties--was moving too slowly to close low-risk cases.

In May, the state agency sent a team of auditors to review cases at its Los Angeles-area office. The auditors helped designate 570 cases that it deemed ready for “immediate closure” and another 435 “low-risk” cases to be terminated after that.

Technicians at the regional water office in Monterey Park conceded that cases may have been kept open too long in the past, but they said a new directive from Director Robert P. Ghirelli is pushing them to end the work with little study.

“You need more than 15 minutes to review a case that has been open for years. Some of these files have very little documentation in them,” said one technician who, like the others, asked not to be named. “We can’t just throw everything out after 10 years of a program, before we have really looked at it.”

Owners of contaminated tank sites typically hire consultants who must detect the location and content of spills in both soil and water. That can mean extensive drilling, repeated underground sampling and, when contamination is found, removal of truckloads of soil.

Workers at the regional water boards use site visits and extensive paperwork in an attempt to assure that the cleanups are conducted properly.

The workers have also protested a new policy imposed by Ghirelli this month that allows the conclusion of cases before all monitoring wells have been sealed, leaving that responsibility to other agencies. Wells that remain open can literally become a hole in the ground for continued illicit dumping and contamination, the technicians said.

They also protested a part of Ghirelli’s order that they close down cleanups even when property owners have not tested for a gasoline additive called methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE).

Some experts have said after the release of the Lawrence Livermore study that the rush to stop cleanup efforts was misguided, because that report and others had not considered the effects of MTBE.

Those concerns emerged this spring when the compound was detected in several Santa Monica drinking water wells. The city has been forced to shut down the wells, which once supplied 40% of the city’s water, and to purchase more water from the Metropolitan Water District.

Discovery of the compound, which helps gasoline to burn more cleanly in car engines, has so far been limited statewide. But state health officials are not even expected to order testing for the suspected carcinogen until later this year.

“No one has decided what to do with MTBE yet. This is a very big issue,” said one of the technicians. “If someone later finds it in the ground water you are just going to have to [reopen the cases and] keep them open for another 10 years.”

Ghirelli conceded that his office is taking a “calculated risk” by closing some cases without information about possible MTBE contamination. “What we are doing in terms of these cases makes sense, to free up resources so we can focus on the really serious cases where we know there is an impact on ground water,” Ghirelli said. “If another Santa Monica case arises, we can always go back and reopen it.”

Representatives of the hundreds of property and business owners who have been struggling with the tank cleanups, meanwhile, said they are gratified that some relief seems to be on the way.

Evelyn Gibson of the California Independent Oil Marketers Assn. called the changes “a very welcome and timely development.” She said some of the group’s 500 members--who sell gas to institutions, large companies and at the retail pump--have been devastated by the costs of cleanups.

The huge cost has also prevented some businesses from meeting another environmental requirement--the replacement of single-wall underground tanks with double-wall tanks to limit leaking, Gibson said. The safety improvement is supposed to be completed by late 1998.

The shutdown of cleanups will free money to pay for the safer tanks and also benefit owners by increasing the value and marketability of their properties, Gibson said.