Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles, P.C.

Forty-five neighbors from a Pennsylvania community that was contaminated by a massive fuel leak more than a decade ago are still fighting for justice. Many residents of  Blue Bell, a town in Montgomery County, Penn., became sick in the late 1990s after consuming water contaminated by several thousand gallons of gasoline released from an underground storage tank at a local Gulf gas station. All of the affected people had wells or access to wells.

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The Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday that the U.S. Army has agreed to pay nearly $30,000 in civil penalties for violating the agency’s underground storage tank (UST) regulations. To help prevent future tank leakage, the Army also agreed to spend nearly $210,000 on upgrading its facilities at Aberdeen Proving Ground, a weapons testing facility in northeastern Maryland.

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Beasley Allen attorneys Rhon Jones, Christopher Boutwell, and Alyce Robertson filed a lawsuit March 19 for Susan Taylor, a resident of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Taylor’s lawsuit alleges that her property has been contaminated by a fuel leak originating from an underground storage tank at the Speedmart Fuel Center. Chatham Oil, Inc. owns the Speedmart that sits next to Taylor’s property on University Avenue in Tuscaloosa.

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The state of California is suing Ohio-based TravelCenters of America, LLC, the owner and operator of several truck stops throughout the state, claiming the company will not comply with California’s underground storage tank regulations.

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The Environmental Protection Agency announced today its allocation of $200 million in funds appropriated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – popularly known as the economic stimulus package, which President Obama signed into law on February 17. The EPA will use these funds for the assessment and cleanup of at least 1,600 leaking underground storage tanks throughout the country, creating or retaining “significant numbers of jobs” in the process.

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Back in March we talked about how the money in Illinois’ Underground Storage Tank Fund was being spent for other purposes under the Blagojevich administration, leaving some businesses that performed extensive (and expensive) tank cleanup work for the state high and dry. Now state representative John Cavaletto (R-Salem) has introduced a bill to the legislature that would protect the state’s UST fund from future sweeps and transfers. Illinois’ House bill 770 underscores the importance of maintaining a fund for UST cleanup.

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Underground storage tank inspectors for the Navajo Nation’s Environmental Protection Agency launched a two-year program geared toward inspecting all of the tanks buried on Navajo land. The federal EPA announced on March 24 that it had issued inspector credentials to two inspectors from the Navajo Nation’s EPA. The Navajo inspectors now have the authority to carry out the important inspections on behalf of the federal EPA.

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In the past few weeks we have looked at how underground storage tanks, particularly older tanks belonging to gas stations, can and often do compromise the health of the surrounding environment and everything in it, including humans. The Environmental Protection Agency has logged more than 620,000 active storage tanks throughout the United States. Of those tanks, some 480,000 tanks have or have had “confirmed releases.” The problem is so extensive that the EPA established the Office of Underground Storage Tanks to confront it. Since its founding 25 years ago, the EPA’s UST office has removed 1.7 million substandard tanks and completed 377,019 cleanups. Thousands of tanks continue to leak.

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Victor, a town just outside Rochester, New York, is being sued by the owners of a Pontillo’s Pizzeria, a regional franchise that owns and operates a restaurant just next to the town’s newly constructed town hall. The plaintiffs say workers involved in the construction of the new town hall building ruptured underground storage tanks containing fuel, which polluted their land. According to a report by MPNnow of Rochester, the suit was filed this month in New York’s Supreme Court for an unspecified amount of damages.

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