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Gas stations keep their gasoline in underground storage tanks. Sometimes those tanks leak. The spilled fuel will spread on top of the water table. What happened before the EPA regulations is this gas would seep into basements and crawl spaces. The fumes would build up until something like the pilot light of a furnace was enough to ignite them. Then boom, the building would explode.
It doesn’t even need to go that far. If that happens in an area that uses well water rather than municipal, the water table contamination will shutter any nearby businesses for longer than they can afford.
This may be outdated info. I learned it in a civil engineering course ~20 years ago.
Oh sure. The water contamination itself is horrific, but it doesn’t stick in people’s mind as well as random buildings exploding.
I’m always shocked how few people know about these. We’re still not even close to cleaning up existing leaks.
even a pinprick-size hole in an underground tank can send 400 gallons of fuel a year into the ground, polluting soil and water. Spills can also destroy habitat and kill wildlife.
Roughly 81 million people live within a quarter-mile of an underground storage tank that’s experienced at least one leak
More than 516,000 leaks have been cleaned upsince Congress directed EPA to begin regulating underground tanks in 1984, but more than 57,000 known sites still await a full cleanup
Ever see an old abandoned gas station lot sit unoccupied for years and years and wonder why nobody buys it? These tanks are why. To build something new on the land, you have to remove the tanks and clean up any spills. It usually costs more than the land is worth.
Walgreens found an “interesting” way of using these properties. They get a 99 year lease, which means they can just pave over the land and leave all the contamination right where it is. The land owner will still be responsible for cleaning up the mess in 99 years, but they’ll be dead so they don’t care. Who cares if the people living nearby have unusually high incidence of cancer, right?
To quote Marge Simpson…OUR WATER WAS ON FIRE
Probably rivers catching on fire again: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/cuyahoga-river-caught-fire-least-dozen-times-no-one-cared-until-1969-180972444/
It’ll speed up my slow death, I’m sure. I love forever chemicals!
/send_help
