Five-year plan for cleanup of ground beneath Oxford gas station proposed
Source: http://www.annistonstar.com, September 23, 2016
By: Zach Tyler
The Alabama Department of Environmental Management on Friday announced a New Jersey-based company has filed a plan to clean up the remaining residue of an underground gasoline leak at an Oxford convenience store.
The cleanup and monitoring of earth beneath the Texaco-branded Expressmart may continue for the next five years, according to the plan, and is needed because a gas tank buried in the store’s parking lot leaked an unknown amount of its contents. The tank is owned by Reb Oil of Alabama, a Florida-formed company with its office in New Jersey, according to business records available online from the Secretary of State.
In the plan to correct the contamination filed with the Department of Environmental Management, Sphere 3 Engineering — a firm from Hoover hired to draft the document — notes that three efforts have been made to clean up the spill, the earliest in August 2015.
The most recent work to suck any remaining gasoline or its chemical components from the ground happened in late June of this year, according to the firm’s plan.
The firm’s engineers wrote that gasoline or other potentially harmful chemicals had been found on the surface at the station and in groundwater underneath, as well as in other water bodies.
Those contaminants reached their highest levels in 2014 and remained high for nearly a year, according to data from tests undertaken by the firm.
The most serious aspect of the leak, according to reports included with the plan, is that it occurred less than a mile from two wells that serve as sources for Oxford Water Works and Sewer Board.
Drinking water, though, has not been affected by the leak, engineers wrote, and there is little threat that it will.
Leaking gas tanks historically have been a bigger problem, though — so much so that a Department of Environmental Management official in 2014 said such leaks were once the leading cause of groundwater contamination in the country.
The state in 1989 set up the Alabama Underground and Aboveground Storage Tank Trust Fund, into which a portion of money from all gas sales goes. That money is then used to help in the cleanup of leaks.
Such cleanups often have an extended timetable — for the remnants of the Oxford leak, Sphere 3 estimates five years — “based solely on experience,” engineers wrote, and assuming quarterly cleanings are enough to do the job.
