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

A leaking underground storage tank on the premises of an old, defunct gas station in Keswick, Virginia, demonstrates how destructive a seemingly innocuous fuel tank leak can be. A report by Charlottesville News & Arts tells the story of David and Holli Traud, who bought a brand-new home just east of Charlottesville last year. However, when they moved in, they noticed that the tap water in their new home had a strange smell and bad taste.

At first the Trauds assumed the water’s bad odor and taste came from being unused, so they gave it the benefit of the doubt and waited a couple of weeks. To their surprise, the problem only grew worse.

The only apparent solution was to have the water tested by a lab, which cost the Trauds a few hundred dollars. When the results were in, the lab contacted David Traud and advised him not to use the water because it contained gasoline components. David called Holli, who was staying with family in North Carolina with their newborn son, and told her to remain where she was.

In the following weeks, the Trauds’ neighbors, David and Irene Mullins, also noticed a problem with the water from their well. Tests from Virginia’s Department of Environmental Quality confirmed that both wells were “severely impacted” by fuel that had been leaking from an underground storage tank at the old gas station. Worse, the leak had been detected more than 10 years ago.

DEQ geologist Todd Pitsenberger told News & Arts that his agency tested the land around the buried tanks back in 1998 and concluded that “the release was relatively minor.” The DEQ took no action because there were no springs or wells in the immediate vicinity.

So when the Trauds built their home in 2007, the county health department issued permits for the construction of wells, unaware that the land was contaminated.

The UST leak, which county officials presumed to be small and relatively harmless, damaged the surrounding environment so severely that the Trauds and their neighbors still can’t drink their tap water. The DEQ installed filtration systems that make the water suitable for washing, but it is still not potable. The agency plans to install new wells this summer.

Cleanup of the site is expected to cost approximately $81,000, a small cost compared to the time, money, and aggravation the Trauds and their neighbors have endured, not to mention the health risks that exposure to fuel-contaminated water can cause.

Geologist Pitsenberger told the News & Arts that underground storage tanks are a big problem in this country. “They started putting tanks in the ground back in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and nobody really thought ‘These things are going to leak.’” In the 80s, however, the Environmental Protection Agency realized that the tanks did leak and that hundreds of thousands of them lay buried in the soil throughout the country, compromising both the health of the environment and the humans who consumed the contaminated water.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.