› $700,000,000 settlement in pollution case
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When we talk about underground storage tanks, we normally talk about how the contents of a leaking UST contaminate surrounding soil and groundwater. This week, however, the Denver Post reported a case of the opposite when soil contaminated with deadly bacteria permeated the walls of one town’s UST. Because the town used the faulty tank to store clean drinking water, hundreds and possibly thousands of town residents became sick.
As many has half a million people who lived on or near the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina have been exposed to highly toxic chemicals that infiltrated the camp’s groundwater from 1957 to 1987. The U.S. government and the Marine Corps blame a now-closed dry cleaning company that once operated off-base but in the area of the camp, in addition to toxic chemicals that leaked from underground storage tanks and unsafe chemical disposal procedures on base.
An Illinois newspaper reports that former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich skimmed millions of dollars off his state’s motor fuel taxes fund to pay for his health care program. According to one local businessman whose company, United Science Industries, removed leaking underground storage tanks for the state, Illinois owes him nearly $20 million for tank cleanup work already performed. But the money isn’t there.
Many Florida gas station owners are worrying about the future of their businesses because of a state law that will go into effect on December 31, 2009. On that day, the law will require all gas station owners with single-wall underground fuel tanks and pipes to upgrade to double-wall tanks or stop selling gas. Industry insiders expect that of the state’s 9,200 gas stations, 800 to 1,500 stores will have to close. 3,156 gas stations and other facilities with underground storage tanks (USTs) in Florida require the upgrade.
