The world of underground fuel storage tanks has largely gone unnoticed by the media and environmental groups in the two decades since Congress first authorized environmental regulations for tanks.
At the same time, vast changes in the industry brought about by these new regulations have caused numerous problems that should be brought to the public's attention. Computer-assisted reporting can make that investigation a little easier.
With the help of CAR, Kansas City Star environment writer Michael Mansur and I uncovered the fact that thousands of leaking underground storage tanks continue to pollute water and soil, despite the new regulations and billions of dollars spent on prevention.
Through the data work and searching paper records we found leak detection was not working.
Our story, published April 22, 2001, in The Star, came a month before a General Accounting Office report that called for congressional review of these problems.
We found that the regulations and problems vary from state to state, and as a result, you'll find a slightly different story in each state. But here are some guidelines to get you started.
The laws
Congress authorized the first environmental regulations for underground storage tanks (UST) in 1984, requiring owners to register their tanks with the state. In 1988, Congress passed a series of laws that took effect gradually over the next decade. By December 1998, all tanks were required to have leak detection, corrosion protection and overfill protection. The law also banned the use of bare steel tanks and required owners to prove financial responsibility in case of a leak.
More information about the federal laws is available on the Environmental Protection Agency Web site, www.epa.gov/swerust11.
State laws
States were required to either adopt the federal laws or enact their own, more stringent, regulations. Idaho is the only state that has not done this. Of the other states, most enacted a mirror of the federal regulations. A few, such as Florida and California, have more stringent laws. For example, Florida also requires tanks to be in an outer container, called secondary containment. Others ban fuel delivery to tanks that don't meet the state regulations.
We wanted to determine whether the new regulations were effective. We discovered that it was difficult to assess the effectiveness of the newest regulations (overspill and corrosion protection), but a much more important piece of the environmental laws - leak detection - had been in place since 1993.
Through the data work and searching paper records we found leak detection was not working. Even those leaks discovered after all tanks were required to be fully "upgraded" in late 1998 were primarily found when the owner took the tanks out of the ground, sometimes months or years after the leak first started.
Databases
To uncover this, we started with the Missouri and Kansas databases of tank registrations and leaks. Generally this information is kept in separate tables and possibly separate databases.
All states should have a database of tank/facility registrations. It may include both underground and aboveground tanks, depending on how your state program is set up. Most states don't have regulations for aboveground tanks, but they collect information from those who volunteer it. Leaks from aboveground tanks must be reported, however.
We obtained these databases from the storage tank units of the state environmental agencies. Both states required payment for copying the data, but it was less than $50, and they were prompt in responding. In both cases we received the information either in database format (dbf) tables or an Access database.
The first request was a little tricky in both states because we found neither agency was accustomed to giving out this information. At first, Kansas gave us their "public" version that doesn't include all of the information. Missouri, on the other hand, gave us everything the first couple times, then suddenly decided the comments field in the leaking tanks data wasn't public.
Many states offer "public" version on their Web sites that would be worth checking out before making a request. Links to state Web sites are available at www.epa.gov/swerust1/states/stateurl.htm
The full databases could consist of multiple files, such as:
One listing each facility/site that has underground and/or aboveground tanks. One listing each tank located at those facilities. Owner information. A leaking sites database. Enforcement actions data. Inspections records.
Facility/tanks
The facility portion will identify the particular gas station and its location. It might include geographical locators such as latitudes and longitudes that could be used to map the data. If so, be sure to also ask what datum they used to determine the "lats" and "longs."
The tank portion will provide details about each tank: whether it is steel or fiberglass, when it was installed, the type of leak detection used, whether it meets the regulations, and many other details. The data may also include those tanks that have been "closed" or removed from the ground, as well as a date when it came out of service. This can be useful for understanding whether a site might be contaminated because of old tanks used prior to the regulations.
The Kansas data kept a separate record on each tank for each year. As a result, you could easily track changes in the tank status or compliance with the laws over several years. Missouri changed the information in the same record whenever the tank status changed; as a result, we lost a lot of historical perspective.
We found that about 30 percent of the active tanks in Missouri had not been inspected during the last three years.
Owner information might be included with the facility or tank data, but it might also be kept separately. This should include the name of the company, a contact person, phone numbers and addresses.
State oversight
We also obtained enforcement and inspection data for Missouri. The state only provided data on "closed" enforcement cases and said the open cases were exempt from the open records law. Since most of the tank laws had just gone into effect a year or two earlier, most of the enforcement cases pertinent to our story were still open.
The inspections data was useful to study the aspect of state oversight.
By doing a subquery between the facility table and the inspection table, I created a list of all active sites (those still pumping gas) that had NOT been inspected between 1998-2000. Then I created a list of facility ID's and the date of its last inspection. To get the last inspection date from the list of inspections (there might be multiple for each site), I did a subquery to find the "maximum," or most recent inspection date.
From that I created a table listing the name, address, city, owner, region, whether it had been upgraded and date of last inspection. We found that about 30 percent of the active tanks in Missouri had not been inspected during the last three years, the maximum time-span recommended for adequate state oversight. The leak database should list one record for each facility that has reported contamination from a leaky tank. Sometimes it's called the "remediation" or LUST data.
The term LUST is the one spot of humor in an otherwise serious industry. Instead of what you might think, LUST stands for Leaking Underground Storage Tank.
The Kansas data made it easy to determine how many leaks were discovered by leak detection because they had a field identifying that information in the LUST data. In Missouri, we pulled that information from paper records and created a new field for it in the database. In both states, leak detection found less than 5 percent of the leaks that occurred after December 1998.
Tank status
The most difficult part of the analysis was determining the status of the tanks at the time the leak occurred. We wanted to know if the tanks had been either replaced or "upgraded" to meet the new laws prior to the leak, or if the contamination occurred before the regulations took effect but didn't get reported until later. Missouri and Kansas didn't directly document this information in the data. Generally, we found it was available indirectly either in other parts of the database or in paper records.
Within the database, I used the tank installation and "out of service" dates for the tanks and compared those to the date the leak was discovered. I used paper records to fill gaps in the database. Both Missouri and Kansas were terrible about consistently filling in fields. The Kansas database could be a gold mine for a reporter because they have fields to track every little thing, but the field agents responsible for entering the information do so haphazardly.
EPA data
This is one of those occasions where the federal level collects very little data. States submit two reports to the EPA each year. These include the number of leaks, active tanks, closed tanks, sites that started cleanup, sites that finished clean-up and number of emergency responses made by the agency. These numbers are then compiled into a list that is posted on the EPA's Web site in PDFs.
The paper reports include other details that provide a good overview of the state program and what things they are working on. You should be able to obtain the reports from either the state agency or the regional EPA office in your area. (In Missouri, their records department kept all of the EPA reports in one file that you could request).
I put the numbers for end-of-the-year reports 1995-2000 from the PDFs into Excel and did some basic calculations.
MaryJo Sylwester can be reached by e-mail at Imsylwester@publicintegrity.com