Source: http://www.gjsentinel.com, February 27, 2016
By: Greg Ruland
If the plumes of gasoline were at the surface, most people would notice the ground stained black and the unmistakable odor.
The reality, though, is they are hidden under streets, sidewalks, homes and businesses at more than 80 locations around Grand Junction, making few aware of a problem that continues to flummox environmental engineers hired to clean up the mess.
City property owners have spent millions of dollars in the past few decades to clean up soil and groundwater contamination caused by dozens of leaking underground storage tanks, some of which were buried and used to dispense fuel starting a century ago. Some are still paying.
A conservative estimate of the total number of tanks once buried around the city exceeds 100. Most have been excavated and carted away, but a few remain in place. There are likely others, too, still buried at sites not yet discovered, according to the Colorado Division of Oil and Public Safety.
One plume is situated under five square blocks of prime commercial real estate in the heart of downtown.
“I am personally committed to cleaning up this mess in some kind of reasonable time frame, and, believe me, it could be the most difficult project to get under control in the state,” Doug Brown, an environmental consultant, wrote in a Nov. 3, 2014, email to Tim Patty, a construction inspector in the city’s Public Works and Utilities Department. Brown, a Fort Collins-based senior process engineer with environmental compliance services firm CGRS, was hired by the state to measure the plume and determine its source or sources.
The good news is most sites no longer pose a risk to people’s health or pollute the environment. About 60 Grand Junction contamination cases have been officially closed by state regulators. But gasoline continues to foul soil and water in at least 28 locations in various stages of remediation.
■ Ten are strung along North Avenue between the 100 and 2100 blocks.
■ Nine are clustered around residential neighborhoods between 12th and 15th streets south of Grand Avenue.
■ Eight are clustered in neighborhoods along Seventh Street between Grand Avenue and Riverside Parkway.
■ One is situated near Clifton.
In some places, monitoring and cleanup of leaks from underground storage tanks have been underway for 25 years or more.
For a problem that has lingered for so many years, few in Grand Junction know the full extent of contamination. Public Works Director Greg Lanning said he was “just getting up to speed” on the subject when asked about it last week. Leading area real estate brokers also say they were unaware of the situation.
“I’ve not heard this discussed within my industry and I’ve not heard it as a topic of discussion within the community,” said Robert Bray, chief executive officer at Bray & Co. Real Estate, a firm with roots in Grand Junction going back 65 years.
State records show health and environmental hazards posed by most of the sites have already been mitigated using one or more of roughly 100 strategies approved by the Division of Oil and Public Safety. Health risks at some sites, however, have never been fully measured.
HEALTH RISKS POSSIBLE
BUT UNLIKELY
Gasoline contains about 150 chemicals — most of them cancer-causing — including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene, commonly known as BTEX compounds. Usually present in very small amounts, BTEX compounds nevertheless pose the greatest risk of serious health effects, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“Probably the biggest danger to human health posed by the contamination in Grand Junction is vapor intrusion into buildings,” Brown wrote in an email to Patty on Dec. 2, 2015. “If a person was to breathe those gasoline vapors on a consistent basis, the health effects could be there.”
When gasoline spills, it doesn’t automatically lead to exposure. Exposure only happens when contact is made through breathing, eating or drinking, or by skin contact.
Exposure to benzene at very high levels for less than 10 minutes can cause death. At lower levels, it causes drowsiness, dizziness, rapid heart rate, headaches, tremors, confusion and unconsciousness. In most cases, these effects stop when the exposure does, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In Colorado, benzene exposure is measured in milligrams per kilogram of soil or water. “Risk based screening levels,” or RBSL, assess the level of risk to health and environment from contamination. Several sites in Grand Junction recorded substances in excess of the state’s RBSL, state records show.
Most people begin to smell benzene in the air at about 60 parts of benzene per million parts of air and recognize it as benzene at 100 ppm. Most people can begin to taste benzene in water at very low levels, 0.5 to 4.5 ppm, according to the EPA.
Benzene can pass into air from water and soil. Once in the air, it reacts with other chemicals and breaks down within a few days. Benzene in water and soil breaks down more slowly. It can migrate through soil into groundwater, but does not build up in plants or animals, according to the EPA.
Long-term exposure to petro chemicals, “specifically benzene, gasoline, and hydrogen sulphide,” has been strongly linked with increased frequency of spontaneous abortions, according to a 1998 study published in the Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology.
Though benzene compounds found at some sites exceeded state safety limits, most were discovered in a range of concentrations at depths considered unlikely to cause health problems, state records show.
The Mesa County Health Department referred inquiries about the health effects of local petro-chemical spills to the Division of Oil and Public Safety.
 
IMPACT ON PROPERTY VALUES COULD VARY
Leading area real estate brokers, unaware until recently of the extent of the problem, said last week that the effect of underground contamination on real property values would be minimal in most cases.
In general, cleanup actually improves land values, according to Bray and Dale Beede, a partner and broker at Coldwell Banker Commercial, Prime Properties. But they said contamination could also depress values, depending on the severity of conditions and the degree of financial responsibility imposed on the owner.
“I don’t think property values are negatively influenced, unless the property is severely contaminated and, therefore, may take years to achieve an environmentally clean status,” Beede said. “In that instance, the property simply may not sell.
“We’ve had these problems for many years and the process continues. It’s still demand and supply that primarily influence the sales value of a property. Environmental issues usually only slow down the sales process.”
Like fingerprints and snowflakes, “every contamination site is unique,” said Mahesh Albuquerque, director of the state Division of Oil and Public Safety.
“Different conditions, different contaminant levels, different soil types, and different receptors” affect each site, he said. Each factor must be considered to fashion the best cleanup plan.
“That’s really what we’re looking at, determining the most practicable, feasible and cost-effective method for each site, and usually that’s what’s deployed after all those considerations,” Albuquerque said.
Again and again across the state, property owners discover their unique contamination sites in the same, ordinary way — excavation in preparation for construction.
“These downtown cleanups, and those across the valley for that matter, may occur any time a buyer or lender requests proof of non-contamination of the soils and testing indicates a problem,” Beede said. “Fortunately, there are protocols that must be followed by those cleaning up the contamination, and it’s usually just a matter of time and money spent before a site meets the requirements to be environmentally ‘clean.’ “
 
PROPERTY OWNERS MUST FOLLOW STRICT PROCESS
Thanks to regulatory changes dramatically tightened since 2004, a uniform process in Colorado starts immediately after spills are reported.
After a report, property owners must “define where (the contamination) is and where it isn’t,” Albuquerque said. “That’s usually done by doing soil borings and putting in monitoring wells on and off the site to assess the level of contamination.”
Normally, environmental consultants are hired to perform the work because specialized technology and complicated regulatory requirements make remediation “typically beyond the scope of lay people involved with dispensing fuel,” he said.
After the contamination is assessed, or “characterized,” a corrective action plan must be approved by the division and carried out.
Cleanup can be finished “99 percent of the time” in rapid fashion and without disrupting buildings, even those built over underground contamination sites. Remediation rarely requires a building to be shut down, Albuquerque said.
There are exceptions, of course, including one particularly notorious site at 702 Main St., well known to regulators as “Dave’s site.” It’s now a vacant piece of land at the northeast corner of Seventh and Main streets but was previously home to Dave’s Downtown Conoco.
The division recently provided The Daily Sentinel with thousands of pages of public records pertaining to 10 of the known sites. In response to a single request, the division supplied a tall stack of paperwork from 118 files, each containing as many as 200 pages and all pertaining to 702 Main St. — ground zero for one or more plumes of contaminated soil and groundwater under the center of downtown.
 
SEVERAL WAYS
TO REMEDIATE
“Very generally, you can dig it out, if you can get to it,” Albuquerque said. “But let’s say it’s beneath a building and really you can’t dig it out. You could use soil vapor extraction — putting a pipe in the ground” and pumping out gas vapors that present health dangers.
“Excavating is certainly one option, but there are many other means,” he said. “Allowing it to degrade naturally … allowing nature to take care of it can be the most effective way.”
Remediating fuel spills around Grand Junction keeps a number of environmental consultants busy — and has for years. By law, property owners where underground storage tanks are buried are financially responsible to pay for cleanup, Albuquerque said.
 
STATE HELPS WITH
CLEANUP COSTS
In Colorado, the average cleanup costs less than $150,000 based on data from 12,000 sites, Albuquerque said. Cleaning spills contained within the boundaries of the owner’s property always costs less.
Expensive complications arise, however, when contamination spreads beyond those boundaries to properties owned by others. The cost of cleaning up 702 Main St., for example, exceeds $500,000 and continues to climb.
For those who comply with regulations, most of the cleanup costs are reimbursed from an underground storage tank fund bankrolled by state gasoline taxes, Albuquerque said.
“The state of Colorado is really fortunate we have a petroleum tank cleanup fund (so) cleanup costs are not such a huge burden (on property owners),” Albuquerque said. “Many states don’t have a fund. Contamination at sites in some states never gets cleaned up.”
All cleanup costs can be recovered up to $2 million, but property owners must do what regulators demand. Failure to comply means no reimbursement from the fund and retroactive fines, penalties and interest. The fund is both a carrot and a stick in the hands of state regulators, records from the best documented cases show.
Grand Junction isn’t the only place dealing with health and environmental hazards posed by rusting underground fuel storage tanks. The tanks have been known to leech gas, diesel fuel and associated benzene compounds from their shredded remains for decades before discovery, Albuquerque said.
 
IGNORANCE AGGRAVATES
THE PROBLEM
Petroleum contaminates the most sites and represents the greatest total volume of contaminated material in the U.S., according to Frank Spellman, author of the 2015 “Handbook for Environmental Engineers.”
Gasoline spilled from underground storage tanks was not, until recently, effectively tracked at the local level, Spellman contends.
Also, ignorance about the extent petroleum migrates through soil and the degree of damage it causes at the surface has delayed a proper regulatory response in many cases.
The 702 Main St. site proves Spellman’s thesis on several points, but there are other proofs. Land at 1225 S. Seventh St., purchased by the city for right-of-way in anticipation of the construction of Riverside Parkway, is one.
Contaminated soil and groundwater was first discovered there in 1989 during an excavation of mill tailings. It took nearly 20 years to clean the site.
An initial investigation found gasoline floating on a sludgy mix of sand and groundwater about 5 feet underground. For decades, contamination from the site migrated toward the Colorado River, 600 feet away.