Environmental Upgrades Close Some Gas Stations Rural Businesses Hit Hardest

D-Day is coming for the owners of underground storage tanks.

The situation is summed up by the black plastic that shrouds gas pumps at Peck’s convenience store in Potlatch, Idaho. A sign reads:

“Closed for environmental update.”

The deadline for meeting new regulations aimed at protecting ground water from fuel leaks is Dec. 22. While this has prompted some expensive and agonizing decisions, and even put some gas stations out of business, there doesn’t seem to be an outcry against the environmental bureaucrats.

Tank owners have had a decade to comply. Businesses not only got frequent reminders, but loans, grants and even cheap insurance to help them afford upgrades.

“The government in this particular instance has done the right thing, which is to say we think there is a problem out there, we have to protect the water … and we’re going to give you 10 years to upgrade,” said Charlie Brown, Washington Oil Marketers Association.

Congress passed the Leaking Underground Storage Tank law in 1988. Its main goal is to keep cancer-causing petroleum out of drinking water.

Tank owners include farms, hospitals, airports and government agencies. But the law’s most noticeable impact is on gas stations, especially in rural areas where there are fewer of them.

Some business owners are resting easy, having made big investments to upgrade or replace aging tanks. Others are scrambling to meet the deadline. The rest are simply calling it quits, unable to justify costly improvements. Many mom-and-pop operations have gone out of business in recent years.

“We’re closing the tanks as of the 22nd,” said Darrell Schute, who said he and his wife can’t afford to replace the tanks that are part of their Sandy’s Drive In near Kettle Falls, Wash.

Schute expects to lose some restaurant business when people can’t fuel up as well as fill up.

“We’ve had plenty of warning on this. If we had acted 10 years ago, things would have been cheaper. But when you’re a small operation, you always have to weigh cost with return.”

His two small, empty tanks can’t stay in the ground. Estimates to remove them range from $3,000 to $5,000, he said. That doesn’t count the cost of any cleanup, in the event gasoline has leaked.

Business owners who decide to upgrade their tanks will spend $25,000 to $40,000, said Al Bunch of Idaho’s State Insurance Fund.

“If you want to replace tanks and put in a Cadillac new system, you could be looking at $150,000 to $250,000. When people do that, they usually knock down the building and put up a new convenience store.”

Marvin Bain will be starting from scratch at Peck’s, one of four convenience stores he owns. It’s a high-profile site, the only gas sold along U.S. Highway 95 in northern Latah County. Motorists have stopped there since 1920. Bain has owned the business since 1980.

In 1991, drinking water at the store began to smell like fuel. There was a leak in the pipe used to fill an above-ground tank behind the station. Unleaded gas found its way into the pump house that brings water from underground.

To clean up the contaminated soil, Bain thought about moving the business up the road next to his Lone Jack restaurant. Then, in 1996, that site flooded for the first time in 40 years and the idea lost its appeal.

Meanwhile, the deadline for upgrading the two underground tanks loomed. Bain risked big fines, and the loss of insurance, if Peck’s stayed open after the deadline. He chose to close down for the two years or so it will take to clean up and rebuild.

“It was a tormenting decision,” he said. “I think you’ll see a lot more closed, the small sites and older sites.”

Idaho and Hawaii are the only states that don’t have their own underground storage tank laws. Idaho is the only state that doesn’t enforce the federal rules, so Environmental Protection Agency inspectors will start checking on compliance after Dec. 22.

Inspectors will start with sites they know aren’t complying, with those that are close to waterways, and with large operations, said EPA compliance officer Gary McCray.

EPA can levy fines up to $11,000 a day for tanks that aren’t up-to-date.

Washington state’s Department of Ecology is enforcing the rules there. It can issue fines of up to $5,000 a day, to either tank owners or to distributors who pump gas into outdated tanks.

Metal tags that look like motorcycle license plates are being attached to all tanks that have met the rules, so distributors know which tanks are OK.

“That’s the best leverage we ever have as a regulatory agency, to say ‘No upgrade, no gas,”’ said Barry Rogowski, Washington’s underground storage tank coordinator.

Businesses that don’t have tags yet are being sent two certified letters reminding them of the deadline.

Nearly 70 percent of Washington sites were up-to-date by last week. The rest of the owners seemed to be calling frantically for information or to get their paperwork in order.

“We are really swamped now,” Rogowski said.

Washington started out with 33,000 underground tanks in 1988. Now the state is down to 13,000 underground tanks. In Spokane County last week, 204 of 269 existing tank sites, or 67 percent, had upgraded to meet the new rules.

The estimated number of tanks remaining in Idaho is 5,000 to 8,000, with an average of three tanks per site. In the five northern counties, 384 gas stations and other tank operations have closed down since 1988; 260 are active. Paula Lyon of the Idaho Division of Environmental quality didn’t know how many have been upgraded.

“I don’t think we’ll have a good sense of who’s closing their doors until Dec. 22,” she said.

The lowest compliance rate in Washington is in Ferry and Garfield counties, where 17 percent of tanks have been upgraded. They only have a half-dozen gas stations each, Rogowski said.

To help maintain gas stations where there is no other fuel within five miles, Washington’s Pollution Liability Insurance Agency issued more than 100 grants to help businesses upgrade.

The state of Idaho is subsidizing low-interest Small Business Administration loans to help tank owners upgrade. One-hundred loans have been made, 83 are being processed and “five or 10 calls are coming in each day,” said Liza Carberry of the state treasurer’s office.

Carberry hit the road last summer to drum up interest in the program.

She’s also visited communities where gas dealers had already taken advantage of the 6 percent loans to stay open. In the Panhandle, those places include Sagle, Priest River, Oldtown, Laclede, Bonners Ferry, Blanchard, Athol, Rathdrum, St. Maries, Kellogg, Kootenai and Post Falls.

“I was delighted to see how much good it actually did,” Carberry said of the loan program.

The new rules require overfill protection, such as an automatic shutoff device; spill prevention, essentially a bucket around the tank fill-up point; and a leak detection system. Most expensive is protection from corrosion, a serious problem with old steel tanks. Replacement tanks are usually clad with fiberglass.

The regulations have meant boom times for businesses that do upgrades. It’s almost impossible to find a contractor right now, said EPA’s McGray.

“We’ll have to take that into consideration when we go out doing inspections. If they have a contractor lined out, that will be a big plus in their favor … maybe it will lower the fines.”

Cut in the Spokane edition.