Felts Field To Dispose Of Old Tanks

A pair of old fuel tanks at Felts Field will be removed and another tank will be filled with sand and capped after airport officials learned the tanks violated Spokane fire codes.

The tanks haven’t been used in years. A deputy fire marshall, Gregory Hesse, said the city doesn’t allow the often rusty, single-walled tanks to remain empty in the ground. An airport spokesperson said the project should be done by Dec. 1. It is expected to cost about $17,000.

Ty Woodard, marketing and public relations manager at Felts, said the two tanks to be removed are located just east of the old Kiernan Aviation Hangar. The third, near the control terminal, is between two fuel tanks that are currently in use.

“Because of its position between the two tanks, the fire marshall said it’s OK at this point to leave that tank in the ground,” Woodard said. “The difficulty of getting in between the two tanks wouldn’t be worth it.”

All over the county, service station owners, farmers and others are having to remove old underground tanks and install new ones with rust protection, two-layer reinforced walls, and monitoring systems to guard against potential leakage. This comes after the state Department of Ecology ruled all tanks not meeting these new standards must be removed by December 1998.

That decision affects Felts Field as well. Because the Valley airport will have to replace all of its tanks by that date, Woodard said the upcoming project is simply a matter of “scheduled maintenance.” “We would have had to do it anyway,” he said.

The Spokane Airport Board, which runs both Spokane International Airport and Felts Field, already has installed five new above-ground fuel tanks at Spokane International.

Woodard said airport officials aren’t expecting any problems, but said workers from Industrial Tank Maintenance, which is removing the tanks, and EMCON Environmental Services, responsible for cleaning and filling the third tank with sand, won’t know if old fuel has leaked into soil until the project begins.

Just in case, there is a $27,750 contingency fund to cover clean-up of any potential contamination.

Larry Schmedding, general manager of Felts Field Aviation, said he doesn’t expect the work, which will include repaving the asphalt surface over the tank areas, will greatly affect operations.

“A small area of ramp space will be used, but there’s plenty of that,” Schmedding said. “Transient aircraft may have to park a little further away, but not much.”