Ed wallace / Messenger photo
Who knew that Gunnison’s Top Stop gas tank was leaking, and when did they know it? Those questions are at the core of a reopened Attorney General’s Office investigation about last summer’s 20,000 gallon gas leak.

AGs office reopens gas leak probe
By John Hales
1-23-08

GUNNISON—The Utah Attorney General’s Office is asking for people to step forward if they know that Top Stop was aware of a leaking underground storage tank long before last summer’s 20,000-gallon leak.
Last week, Lt. Patty Ishmael announced that the AG’s Office was reopening an investigation into whether Top Stop ignored and perhaps covered up the leak, perhaps for years.
“This is a last ditch effort to see if Top Stop did any criminal wrongdoing. If people have information they need to step forward. They need to do the right thing and tell us about it,” Ishmael said last Thursday.
The first effort the AG’s Office made at investigating Top Stop ended in a finding of no wrongdoing, since records showed that Top Stop adequately notified the state about the leak as soon as the tank failed a leak test performed by a third party.
“What we were looking at the first time, there was no evidence of wrongdoing. There is no criminal provision for failure to report,” Ishmael said.
The question now, spurred by continued rumors through the community, is whether Top Stop was aware that the tank was leaking before a third party made that determination, and then kept it quiet.
“DEQ [Department of Environmental Quality] contacted me and asked me to get involved again because they keep hearing mutterings,” Ishmael said.
Those mutterings include rumors that Top Stop officials told employees who knew of the leak to say nothing, and that the corporate office may have doctored inventory discrepancies to disguise the leak.
Several people have said that fumes from presumably leaking gas could be smelled as far back as two years before last summer’s huge release.
“We continue to hear from the public persistent rumors that perhaps the leak was happening before last July, and even though we don’t have any evidence of that at this time, we felt like it was worth going back and making sure that we had adequately investigated the situation,” said Brad Johnson, director of the DEQ’s Division of Environmental Response and Remediation.
In November, the Messenger ran an editorial that called on the DEQ to demand a more thorough investigation.
The previous investigation relied almost solely on Top Stop’s own records that it gave to the state, and examined only records dealing with July’s leak. Both Johnson and Ishmael said the current investigation will indeed be more thorough.
Johnson said his department had requested daily inventory reports from Top Stop going back two years before the leaking tank’s removal in August. He said that while investigating falsification of records was not the primary reason for the request, it would indeed be on the minds of those at DEQ as well as the AG’s Office.
“We would actually both look for something like that, but we don’t have any reason to believe that’s the case right now. Certainly as part of what we’re doing we’ll check into that,” he said.
Ishmael said that instead of relying on records alone, she will consider personal testimony in her investigation.
“I do plan to come down and interview people,” she said, emphasizing that she could do nothing on rumor alone.
“We keep hearing rumors that people know something, but they won’t step forward.
“I need witnesses or physical evidence. Right now the only physical evidence I have is documentation from Top Stop.”
Ishmael invited people with possible information to call her at (801) 281-1211.
Upon being told that his company was once again under watch by the AG’s Office, Top Stop President Craig Larson responded to the rumors leading to the investigation.
“I think they’re categorically false,” Larson said. “What we’re concerned about is the cleanup that’s going on and doing as much as we can to clean the thing up. We can’t control rumors.”
Gunnison’s attorney in the matter, Peter Stirba, also responded to the news of the investigation. “It's an interesting development, and certainly we've felt all along that the review done initially by the state concerning possible criminality here was terminated prematurely. So we are pleased to see that the matter ahs been reopened and that the state will review it again,” he said.