The dangers beneath us/buried gas, oil tanks are leaking by the thousands,
threatening LI's aquifers, as NY eases cleanup rules
By Dan Fagin, Staff writer
Copyright 1998 Newsday
August 23, 1998
Almost 10,000 gasoline and oil spills, some of them more than a decade old, are
contaminating the underground aquifers that supply drinking water to Long
Island and southeast Queens even as state environmental officials aren't
enforcing laws that call for complete cleanups.
Leaking tanks buried beneath
lawns, industrial sites and especially service stations are the most widespread
toxic threat to the region's water supply. Drinking water is generally safe by
the time it reaches consumers because of testing and treatment by water
companies, but petroleum chemicals are tainting about 1 in 10
water-supply wells - usually at very low levels - and seeping into basements or
beneath the yards of hundreds of unsuspecting communities from Shelter Island
to Long Island City.
In those communities, people are facing hazardous vapors, foul smells, falling
property values and an anxiety-filled future over the
health effects of living near a toxic spill. But the proliferation of tank
leaks also is a long-term threat to the entire region. As the number of
unfinished spill cleanups - most of which involve leaks under 100 gallons -
continues to build, petroleum chemicals are spreading into underground aquifers
and are increasingly
being pumped back out of the ground by drinking-water wells.
The risk of drinking contaminated water is highest in areas served by shallow
private wells, almost all of which are in Eastern Suffolk, because those
private wells aren't regularly tested and filtered for toxic chemicals. But
experts say that even deeper public wells are becoming more
vulnerable because the inventory of unfinished spill cleanups is growing, and
because an increasing number of those spills involve the gasoline additive
MTBE, which can travel for a mile or more in groundwater without losing its
toxicity.
Water companies routinely test public wells for toxicity as frequently as once
a week, but the testing and filters aren't foolproof, and water rates can soar
if tainted wells have to be abandoned or deepened to reach cleaner parts of the
aquifer.
The problem is decades old, but the scope has gotten dramatically worse in
recent years as scarce funds and imperfect technology limit the
number of cleanups and new spills occur every day.
Faced with this growing threat, the state's response effectively has been to
give up on fully cleaning many of the polluted sites, saying there isn't enough
money to do anything but basic triage in many cases. In doing so, the
state Department of Environmental Conservation has been choosing not to follow
the strict cleanup standards specified in state law and instead has shifted to
a case-by-case approach favored by industry, letting spillers abandon many
costly cleanups even when excessive concentrations of cancer-causing
chemicals are still present in groundwater, according to interviews and a
Newsday review of state spill records.
And now the Pataki administration, in a process that documents show is heavily
influenced by the petroleum industry, is moving to adopt a different set of
cleanup rules that is even less
strict than the current case-by-case aproach.
Even when water wells aren't affected, the fuel spills are deeply alarming to
the neighborhoods in which they occur.
"This is a nightmare for all of us," said Ira Brophy of Valley Stream, where an unseen 2,000-foot-long plume of
gasoline
courses beneath a quiet cul-de-sac. Brophy and 16 of his neighbors have been
battling the state and Mobil Oil Corp. since learning last year that a gasoline
leak from a nearby service station was apparently responsible for the odors he
and nearby residents have been smelling for years, and
for the gasoline vapors in their basements.
"There's no end in sight, and we have the sense that no one's in charge," said Brophy. Added his neighbor, Abraham
Alcabes:
"This stuff has been pouring down on us for years, and no one did a damn thing
about it."
The officials
who run the state's cleanup program are used to such criticism but say the
public - and the state's own laws and regulations - don't fully recognize how
expensive and difficult it is to clean up an underground spill once it has
reached the aquifer, or water table.
"We just don't have the manpower or the
resources to deal with every spill," said Karen Gomez, who supervises the state's spill cleanup efforts on Long
Island.
It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean up a gasoline spill that
seeps through soil and hits the water table, and even a simple
cleanup of a leaking backyard oil tank often costs $ 7,000 or more. Tank owners
usually pay for cleanups, but if they can't or won't cooperate, the state has
to tap its chronically depleted spill fund (funded by a wholesale tax on
petroleum) and then try to recoup
costs by suing the spillers.
In Long Island and Queens, where more than 5,000 fuel spills are reported to
the state every year, the state spends about $ 5 million a year on cleanups,
and tank owners spend an estimated $ 50 million. But that hasn't been enough to
make a dent in the huge backlog of unfinished cleanups, now just shy of 10,000
in the three-county area.
Many spills are so difficult to clean up that even after pumping and treating
hundreds of millions of gallons of tainted groundwater at a spill site,
toxic chemicals such as benzene and MTBE are still present at levels above the
minimum standards the state uses to define clean groundwater and soil,
regulators say.
"What New York State has learned is that it is impossible to achieve those
standards in almost all cases," said Jim DeZolt, the chief of the
DEC's bureau of spill prevention and response.
"As a practical matter, it became clear that the strict language of the law is a
condition that can't be achieved in the field."
The state's case-by-case approach to spill cleanups isn't ideal but still
protects the public, officials argue, because
it steers funds to the spills that pose the most direct threat to water wells.
But they acknowledge that a more aggressive approach would prevent more wells
from being contaminated, and say they would rather not have to rely on testing
and filtering by water companies to remove chemicals from wells.
"We've had to
come up with a process that recognizes that the ideal condition is just not
achievable . . . but is also still protective of the public , and we've done
that," said DeZolt.
To find out how well that process is working, Newsday commissioned a unique
analysis of reports that state investigators filed for each of the
41,901 spills in Long Island and Queens that as of April 1 were listed in the
state's database, which goes back more than 10 years. The analysis was done by
Toxics Targeting Inc. of Ithaca, an environmental data collection company
familiar with the spill program.
The key findings of that analysis, and of
Newsday's six-month examination of the state's spill program, include:
- Nearly one in four spills in Nassau, Suffolk and Queens - 9,266 of 41,901
spills - have not been cleaned up sufficiently to meet the state's minimum
standards for groundwater or for soil. And while the state says its
case-by-case policy is designed to focus scarce cleanup dollars on the most
severe spills, an even higher 30 percent of spills over 100 gallons - 714 of
2,404 spills - don't meet the state's minimum standards.
- The backlog of unfinished cleanups is growing. Years
after they were discovered, many of the spills that pose the greatest risk to
drinking water - spills over 100 gallons that don't meet cleanup standards -
are still expanding into underground aquifers. The average such spill in the
three-county area is more than three years old, and 128 spills over 100
gallons that don't meet standards are still listed by the state as
"open" cases more than five years after they were discovered. Twenty-eight of those
spills were discovered more than 10 years ago.
- The state's response to its growing inventory of unfinished cleanups has been
to lower its minimum cleanup standards without any
specific authorization in state regulations or law, and to increasingly rely on
consultants hired by the polluters to determine how much of a spill should be
cleaned up. Starting in 1992, the standards for chemical concentrations have
been considered guidelines, not requirements. As a result, a growing
number of those sites are simply being written off. In Nassau, Suffolk and
Queens, 1,965 spill sites that don't meet cleanup standards have been
classified by the state as
"inactive" or
"closed," including 109 sites in which more than 100 gallons were spilled.
- Enforcement has been spotty at best. Regulators
rarely seek fines against tank owners even when they conclude a spill wasn't an
accident. For the 2,506 spills classified as deliberate in Nassau, Suffolk and
Queens, state investigators recommended that DEC attorneys seek penalties in
just 32 cases. The percentage of cases
in which tank-owners actually end up paying a fine is even lower, and criminal
convictions are almost unheard of.
"We're engineers and geologists, not cops," explained Randall Austin, who runs the spill program in the DEC's New York
City regional office.
"You've
got to catch somebody red-handed."
- The reported statistics on spills almost certainly underestimate the extent
of the problem. The state's computer database excludes many older spills, and
officials acknowledge others may have been wrongly classified as meeting
standards especially if they involve MTBE, because regulators have been slow to
recognize that the
gasoline additive moves farther and faster in groundwater than other petroleum
chemicals. More significantly, many fuel spills are never discovered, or are
found only after water wells have been affected.
The Suffolk County Department of Health Services, for example, last year tested
only about
3,000 of the more than 50,000 private water wells in the county, and found
petroleum chemicals in several hundred of them.
In public wells in Nassau and Suffolk, officials said the detection rate for
petroleum is about 1 in 10, although Nassau doesn't have complete figures
yet because some water districts have been testing for MTBE only for a few
months. The Suffolk County Water Authority, for example, last year found
petroleum chemicals in about 8 percent of its 500-odd wells, almost always at
levels within
state safety standards for drinking water, according to county health
officials.
But when Suffolk finds petroleum chemicals in a well and traces it back to a
leaking tank, more than half of the time the leak's existence is a surprise to
the state DEC, said Joseph
Baier, director of environmental quality for the county health department. And
when the Nassau County health department five years ago dug up almost 100
residential oil tanks in Levittown as part of a special study, it found that 25
percent of them were leaking - almost always
without the owners knowledge, said Joseph Haas, an engineering geologist at the
Long Island office of the state DEC.
"The bottom line," said Haas,
"is we really don't know how many of them are out there."
Underground leaks can be devilishly difficult to discover, whether they're
coming from a backyard heating
oil tank or a large gasoline tank buried beneath a service station. While some
tank owners learn they have a problem after noticing their fuel use has
inexplicably risen, many leaks are discovered only if vapors penetrate nearby
basements or reach water wells.
There are
probably several hundred thousand buried fuel tanks in Nassau, Suffolk and
Queens, ranging from massive 5-million-gallon gasoline storage tanks in Long
Island City to the tens of thousands of 275-gallon backyard oil tanks that dot
Nassau and Suffolk and supply most of the
region's home heating energy.
While those small heating oil tanks can be a problem, especially near the South
Shore where the high water table can corrode tank walls, the far bigger threat
to drinking water comes from buried gasoline tanks, usually at service
stations. That's not only because gasoline tanks are larger than oil tanks - a
typical service station tank holds about 8,000 gallons - but because gasoline
is far more likely than oil to pass through the soil and reach groundwater, and
contains more of the volatile organic compounds such as benzene, toluene and
MTBE. Ingesting those compounds at very high levels, or at lower levels over a
long period of time, can cause ailments ranging from cancer and genetic damage
to dizziness, nausea and watery eyes.
Tank leaks are a special danger on Long Island and in southeastern
Queens because those areas are entirely dependent on aquifers for drinking
water, and because pollutants quickly penetrate the region's sandy soil and
reach the shallow water table. Most of New York City gets its drinking water
from upstate reservoirs, but about 520,000 people in southeast Queens
rely at least in part on 46 water wells. Nassau and Suffolk, meanwhile, rely
completely on the 1,050 public wells that serve about 95 percent of the Long
Island population, and on the tens of thousands of backyard wells that supply
the remaining five percent, mostly
in Eastern Suffolk.
Fuel leaks have become so common that their total numbers overwhelm other
groundwater threats that have gotten much more attention, such as radioactive
tritium discharged from Brookhaven National Laboratory and
pesticides in East End wells. That's because gasoline, though obviously a hazardous
substance, is
something that people are used to dealing with every day, experts suggest.
"There are so many of these smaller . . . spills , they affect a lot of people,
and they get a lot less attention," said Henry Bokuniewicz, director of the Long Island Groundwater Research
Institute at the State University at Stony
Brook.
"My instinct tells me that you would derive greater public benefit by putting
resources into cleaning them up, and that Brookhaven Lab is getting attention
and resources that are probably disproportionate to the nature of the problem
because of all the public attention."
On Ash Lane in Valley Stream, residents are convinced. The neighborhood of
spacious
homes and dogwood-lined streets is an apt example of just how disruptive a
gasoline plume can be.
At the end of the cul-de-sac, just past Ira and Betty Brophy's house, is a
dense patch of cedars, oaks and maples that screens the neighborhood from Green
Acres
Mall and Sunrise Highway, 300 feet to the north. But that barrier couldn't
protect Ash Lane from a 2,000-foot-long stream of gasoline seeping into the
area from a Mobil station on Sunrise Highway.
Brophy first caught a strong whiff of gasoline on Ash
Lane in 1995 as he was climbing into the silver Acura he had just leased.
Puzzled that there were no leaks from the car, he noticed that the odor seemed
to be coming from a nearby manhole cover to a storm sewer. In late 1996,
another neighbor started smelling gasoline in a basement playroom, and
a third smelled it in the spring of 1997.
But the three residents didn't know their problems were connected until last
August, when the state conservation department sent out letters to the
neighborhood saying that tests conducted by a consulting firm Mobil had hired
found a
contamination plume from the station has seeped into the area.
Ever since, the leak has been an inescapable force in the lives of the
residents of Ash Lane and several nearby streets.
At least two home sales in the neighborhood have fallen through because of the
spill -
"How do you sell a house that has a monitoring well
at the base of the driveway?" asked one resident - and committees of neighbors have spent long hours
lobbying for a cleanup and combing through public records to look for
information they say the state and Mobil have been slow to provide. They also
hired a lawyer, Barry Fine of Huntington, who earlier this
month sued Mobil for $ 70 million on behalf of 17 local families.
"We have the sense that we don't really know who's in charge," said Brophy, who said residents are fearful that the
six recent cancer cases
in the neighborhood could somehow be related to the spill.
Air tests conducted
by the Nassau Health Department show that in more than a dozen homes on Ash
Lane and adjacent Woodland Road, airborne components of gasoline - mostly low
levels of benzene, toluene or MTBE - have entered basements or ground floors,
either through sump pumps or sewer pipes. There are
no specific health standards for petroleum chemicals in household air, but
county officials told residents there was no immediate danger.
Far beyond Ash Lane and Woodland Road, meanwhile, the groundwater shows the
effects of the gasoline leak. The area relies on public water
wells, none of which have been affected so far, but tests conducted by Mobil's
consultant show elevated levels of MTBE 30 feet below the surface as far away
as East Elderberry Lane, which is about 2,000 feet from the Mobil Station on
Sunrise Highway. That means the plume is beneath
about 100 Valley Stream homes - and it's still expanding southward.
Mobil and state regulators say they've made the Valley Stream spill a priority,
but that the size and complexity of the plume means it takes time to figure out
exactly where to locate collection wells to pump
out the contaminated water so it can be treated and then pumped back into the
ground.
"You don't just punch holes in the ground without assessment information. If the
well goes in the wrong place, it does not address the problem," said Ida Walker, a Mobil spokeswoman, who
said the company first learned the plume had expanded beyond the station
property and was moving south in 1996.
Mobil installed a cleanup system at its station in June of this year, and in
the fall it plans to build another groundwater treatment system on public land
200 feet farther south, near the trees behind the Brophys house. That system
"is going to be on for a very long time," Walker said, but may not be sufficient to take care of the problem.
Big companies like Mobil aren't the only ones facing huge financial
liabilities for spills. Plenty of ordinary residents of Long Island and Queens
have woken up in the morning to discover that they are polluters, and that
unless their insurance covers such spills, they're going to have to pay.
"It's horrible to feel like you're responsible for polluting the river," said Dana Goldman of Riverhead. When the
oil tank at her home leaked into the Peconic River in 1995, a contractor hired
by the state to clean it up set up booms on the river and dug up most of her
backyard. Ultimately, she said, her sister, who owns the property, may have to
reimburse the state
for the cost of the cleanup unless she can pin the blame on their former
heating-oil company.
And in Seaford, single mother Maureen Kane is facing the prospect of financing
a five-year cleanup of oil that leaked from her backyard tank - a cleanup her
insurance company won't cover.
"I don't know what I'm going to do," she said.
Since the 1970s, governments have been struggling with the question of how to
deal with tank leaks. The state's spill fund was established in 1978, and two
years later Suffolk County became one of the first local governments to adopt a
comprehensive program to
test older commercial tanks to see if they are leaking. Nassau and New York
City later passed similar laws, but they haven't stopped the leaks because
enforcement has been inconsistent, many residential tanks are exempt, and even
the newer commercial tanks aren't leak-proof.
Nationwide attempts to mandate tank
replacement have run into many of the same problems. This year, for example,
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is in the embarrassing position of
acknowledging that its long-awaited Dec. 22, 1998, deadline for upgrading or
replacing substandard large fuel tanks - a deadline the EPA set 10 years
ago - is being ignored, and that the agency won't be able to do much about it.
As leak prevention efforts have fallen short and the state's backlog of
unfinished spill cleanups has steadily increased, state officials have been
changing the rules that determine when a cleanup can end.
Exactly when the state switched from enforcing fixed
cleanup standards to a case-by-case approach isn't easy to pin down. The
switchover appears to have been a gradual process that began when the
"spill guidance manual" used by state investigators was revised in 1992 to allow sites to be declared
"inactive" even if they don't meet minimum
cleanup standards.
For the state, the case-by-case approach has two big advantages over the older,
stricter approach to cleanups: it requires less money and less staffing, both
of which have been in short supply.
While the state DEC's workload has steadily increased in recent years,
staffing has stayed slightly below 1991 levels.
"We do get swamped, and things drag out for years," said Austin, the New York City spill supervisor.
Budget pressures, meanwhile, have gotten much worse because of the precarious
condition of the state's spill fund, which the conservation department taps
when tank
owners won't take the lead on financing their own cleanups.
The fund, financed with a four-cent-per-barrel tax on petroleum imported into
the state, is flirting with insolvency. Last year, the state spent $ 30.2
million on cleanups but collected just $ 21.1 million
in taxes, reimbursements and federal aid, causing the fund's balance to dwindle
to less than $ 3 million. Just three years ago, there was $ 15 million in
available cash in the spill fund.
To try to replenish the fund, the Legislature last year increased from three to
12 the number of lawyers
in the attorney general's office who handle spill reimbursement cases. But the
hoped-for surge in reimbursement collections from spillers hasn't materialized
yet because the cases take so long to resolve. And state officials say
collecting a few million dollars more every
year from spillers may not sufficiently bolster a fund that faces more demands
than ever but gets most of its money from a tax that hasn't been increased in
20 years.
Conservation department officials acknowledge that the shortage of public money
is an important reason for their case-by-case approach to cleaning up spills.
"Do we clean up every spill to pre-release conditions? Absolutely not. There is
not enough money to do that," said Ray Cowen, the DEC's Long Island regional director.
"We can still protect the public by taking a more common-sense
approach to these cleanups."
But local critics and some outside experts argue that the state's policy of
writing off some spills that don't meet its own standards ignores the region's
unique dependance on groundwater.
"Each site does have to be considered individually. But generally speaking, any
spill that has the ability to
reach that sole source aquifer, in my personal opinion, should be cleaned up to
groundwater standards," said John Heffelfinger of the EPA's office of underground storage tanks.
While the EPA encourages states to adopt a risk-based, case-by-case approach to
cleaning up tanks,
applying that approach correctly on Long Island
"is going to lead to a stringent cleanup for basically all the spill sites" said Dana Tulis, the director of the office.
But critics say it hasn't worked out that way, perhaps because spillers wind up
taking the lead
in running cleanups in about nine out of 10 cases, not only by writing checks
but also by choosing and overseeing the consulting firm that does the work. The
other 10 percent of the time, the conservation department taps its spill fund
to pay for cleanups - often hiring
many of the same consulting firms to do the work - and then seeks reimbursement
from spillers.
Critics say the process gives far too much power to tank-owners and their
consultants. Most of the time, the consultant, not the state, decides how to go
about cleaning up a spill and then does the cleanup. While state officials
can require changes, they often don't.
Last year on Long Island, for example, the state insisted on major changes in
fewer than 30 of the 600-odd cleanup plans prepared by spillers consultants,
according to Gomez, the state's chief spill regulator in
Nassau and Suffolk.
"Occasionally we'll tell them they're way off, but a lot of times it's more that
they have the right idea but just need a little more information to back it up."
It's a process that leaves neighboring residents on the sidelines and in the
dark, because the state often does not inform neighbors that a spill is nearby.
"The state relies on the responsible party for all their information, and are
the last ones to inform homeowners that there's a plume of contamination in
their area," said lawyer Neal Capria, whose first spill case was representing 553
South Setauket residents in Long Island's largest-ever petroleum spill, the 1.5
million-gallon 1987 gasoline leak from a Northville Industries storage
terminal.
Consultants frequently try to convince the state that a cleanup has gone far
enough and that further efforts aren't worth the time or
expense if drinking water wells aren't affected.
"It's a subjective process. We're asking our people to use their professional
judgment that it's okay to stop," said DeZolt, who supervises the spill program statewide.
Lobbying from the petroleum industry, state officials say, wasn't behind their
adoption of
a case-by-case approach. But the switchover did coincide with the nationwide
push by the nation's major gasoline producers and retailers to persuade states
to adopt flexible,
"risk-based" cleanup rules.
"Why would you want to subject a site to an overly strict cleanup standard,
based on
an absolute worst-case scenario, if you know that the situation at the site
doesn't warrant that?" asked Kyle Isakower, a senior analyst at the Washington-based American
Petroleum Institute, the oil industry's chief trade group.
New York, too, has been part of the industry's push. In 1994 and
1995, the DEC headquarters staff in Albany launched a process aimed at
codifying
"risk-based" cleanup standards in regulations or even state law.
Five years later, they're still trying.
After studying the issue for three years, the conservation department
unveiled its proposal in January, 1997. The proposed rules would have given
spill investigators even more flexibility in closing off cleanups without
complying with fixed standards.
"It allows you to leave a little more petroleum behind," said Gomez.
Right now, for example,
DEC officials usually give tank owners permission to stop cleaning up a spill
only after a cleanup has gone on for a few months or years and there's evidence
that levels of MTBE or benzene in groundwater aren't dropping as quickly as
they did when the cleanup effort began.
Under the rules the state proposed last year, however, tank owners in many
cases could stop after doing a study that found minimal risk to water wells,
instead of waiting to see the results of the early stages of a cleanup effort.
But the Pataki administration quickly withdrew the
proposal after environmental groups complained they weren't consulted. Instead,
it passed the issue to an outside advisory committee appointed by the DEC.
The point of the outside panel was to provide the public input that was missing
from the interim rules the state had just dropped. But state records show the
panel's
members overwhelmingly represent business interests, especially those of the
petroleum industry.
The 17-member steering committee coordinating the effort, for example, has just
two non-business members, only one of whom regularly attends meetings. And of
the more than 150 people who have volunteered to serve on the subcommittees
that are drafting the
specifics of the proposal, there is just one representative of an environmental
group, one public health official and no water providers. More than 50 percent
are consultants or attorneys and another 23 percent represent businesses or the
petroleum industry. Most of the rest are from government agencies.
"It's been really difficult because out of all the
people who are participating in this process, I'm the only one whose bottom
line is the environment, as opposed to controlling costs," said Val Washington, executive director of Albany-based Environmental
Advocates, the sole member representing an environmental group.
State officials say they've tried to broaden the
membership, but say it's been hard to find environmentalists and other people
from outside the industry willing to make the necessary time commitment.
"We've been a little frustrated that the group isn't as representative as we
might have liked," said Tom Plesnarski, DEC's liaison to the advisory group.
The group's final recommendations, as
it turns out, closely resemble the plan the state withdrew early last year,
including the heavy reliance on studies that try to project the possible impact
on water wells. Those recommendations are to be formally submitted to the
conservation department in a few weeks. But state officials
say it may be a year or more before the Pataki administration decides whether
to formally adopt the plan, either through regulation or by asking the
Legislature to amend state law.
In the meantime, state spill investigators are continuing to allow tank owners
to abandon some cleanups that don't
meet state standards.
Some lawyers and legislative officials say the state's case-by-case approach is
illegal because it conflicts with provisions of state law that classify all
groundwater as potential drinking water, and because it was never explicitly
authorized in law or regulation. Instead, it was included
in a series of 1992 revisions to the manual used by the state's spill
investigators.
"Under state law, all groundwater is treated as potential public water supply,
so they're violating the statute and violating their own guidance memoranda," said Rick Morse, staff director of Legislative
Commission on Toxic Substances and Hazardous Wastes, a joint Assembly-Senate
committee.
The conservation department's expert on the topic acknowledged the law is
murky.
"The definition of cleanup and removal is extraordinarily loosely written, and
it varies depending on which section of the law you're referring to," said Ben
Conlan, a DEC attorney.
He agreed the state's groundwater standards apply to all contamination plumes
whether or not they threaten drinking-water wells, and no matter how costly
they are to clean up. And he also conceded that spillers are legally liable for
"all cleanup and removal costs" under state law.
But that strict language applies to legal liability, not the cleanup, he said.
"If you're looking for an express requirement for cleanup to pre-release
conditions, I've yet to find one," said Conlan.
As a result, the state has been careful in the language it uses to describe
cleanups that have been abandoned without meeting standards. Instead of being
"closed" those cases are now often deemed
"inactive" - a legal distinction that doesn't mean much in reality because state
officials say they can't remember an inactive case ever being reopened in the
three-county area
since the DEC began to frequently use the term five years ago.
"There's a lot of subjectivity," said DeZolt, who runs the state's spill program.
"Sure it's confusing and frustrating to the public, because it's frustrating for
us, too. We have to figure this stuff out every day." NEXT: MTBE, the
newest threat to drinking water Mapping Toxic Sites Around LI In Your Town
Today's LI Life includes customized maps showing major petroleum spills in each
of Long Island's towns. The maps, prepared for Newsday by Toxics Targeting Inc.
of
Ithaca, show the locations of hundreds of large oil and gasoline spills that
are too contaminated to meet the state's definition of clean soil or
groundwater, according to state records.
To see all of the maps, Internet users can go to http://www.newsday.com and
follow the links. Internet users can also see the
precise location of individual spills on a detailed street grid at
http://www.toxicstargeting.com and can obtain additional spill information, for
a fee, from Toxics Targeting.
**** Spills of the Island As of April 1, there were 41,901 gasoline and oil
spills in Nassau, Suffolk and
Queens in the state Department of Environmental Conservation's computer
database. Here's how they break down by location, cause, and whether they've
been cleaned up enough to meet state soil and groundwater standards: .
Queens Nassau Suffolk. Meet cleanup standards 3,286 14,976 14,373. Don't meet
standards
4,184 2,387 2,695. . . Cause.
Queens Nassau Suffolk. Equipment Failure 2,366 5,554 4,355. Unknown 1,461 2,263
2,848. Tank Test Failure 880 1,879 1,347. Other 380 1,807 1,814. Tank Failure
463 1,347 1,179. Human Error 611 1,125
1,025. Deliberate 259 934 1,313. Tank Overfill 601 810 782. Traffic Accident
180 746 808. Abandoned Drum 100 326 852. Housekeeping* 145 466 569. Vandalism
19 65 122. None Given 5 41 54. .
*-Fuel storage
sites where there have been numerous small spills during fuel transfers.. .
SOURCE: Toxics Targeting Inc., from data compiled by the state Department of
Environmental Conservation.
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