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California’s State Water Resources Control Board oversees the implementation of some of the country’s strictest environmental regulations, including those that govern the inspection, monitoring, removal, and cleanup of underground storage tanks. The only problem is that the cash-strapped state doesn’t have enough money in its Barry Keene Underground Storage Tank Cleanup Fund to cover all the UST work in progress.
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.
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.
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.
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