Top Stop president defends company; Gunnison attorney calls statement ‘incomplete assessment’
By John Hales
1-23-08

GUNNISON—In the same week that a criminal investigation was reopened into the Top Stop gas leak in Gunnison, company and city officials argued about the leak and how Top Stop has responded in the aftermath.
On Tuesday last week, Craig Larson, president of Top Stop parent company Wind River Petroleum, issued a set of 13 “bullet points” about gas leaks in general and Top Stop’s actions subsequent to the Gunnison leak.
Larson’s bullet points were made in defense of his company, which has been the target of constant criticism since the gas leak last summer.
On Friday Gunnison’s attorney, Peter Stirba, fired back at Top Stop, calling Larson’s statement an “incomplete assessment of the facts.”
The first few of Larson’s bullet points regarded general gas-leak statistics:
• There have been 4,341 leaks from underground storage tanks in Utah since 1986, including 90 new ones in 2007.
• There are 455 current remediation projects in Utah; there are 108,766 such projects in the entire U.S.
Stirba said the use of those statistics was an attempt to minimize the release in Gunnison.
“The overall message we sense from Mr. Larson’s statements is, ‘Hey, it’s okay. These things happen all the time.”
Larson said that was not his intent.
“Our purpose was to educate people that while certainly we’re concerned about Gunnison, leaking underground storage tanks are historical, fairly common occurrence. That’s why there are whole departments at the state that regulate and supervise them,” Larson said.
Larson’s statement noted that the underground tanks at the Gunnison Top Stop had been installed quite some time before Top Stop owned the site.
Stirba said the age of the tanks should have made Top Stop more diligent in monitoring for leaks. “Our question is whether Wind River knew that their old steel tanks have been releasing fuel for years,” he said.
Stirba also took issue with Larson’s assertion that Wind River had “complied with all federal and state requirements for reporting, monitoring and now remediation.”
Larson clarified that statement later, saying that his company had responded to all the state’s request for records, including a request made just two weeks ago that asked for daily inventory reports going back to the summer of 2005.
Stirba, however, cited a couple of instances when Wind River’s Gunnison store had been noncompliant with certain requirements of the Department of Environmental Quality, though those instances were both prior to 2002.
Larson described remediation efforts being done, and said “the standards that we are using as acceptable [benzene] levels for homes and businesses is more stringent than the levels of benzene found in the outside air in Manti, Gunnison, West Valley City, Salt lake City, Bountiful, etc.”
Stirba questioned why Larson would make such comparisons, saying, “We do not comprehend his rationale for comparing the air quality of a small rural city to a major metropolitan city.”
Larson said the air in all but one home and one business had been confirmed safe, yet Stirba said there were still six homes and two businesses that still required air samples to be confirmed by laboratory tests.
“The Gunnison Top Stop gasoline spill has devastated several families and businesses, and we are extremely disappointed that Wind River continues to minimize the consequences of the gasoline release,” Stirba said.
Larson had a different point of view. “What we’re concerned about is the cleanup that’s going on and doing as much as we can to clean the thing up. … Our main concern is to make sure the families are breathing clean air and that we clean the [underground plume up, and we’ve made some great strides in that area,” he said.
Larson also responded to charges made by Gunnison officials that his company was taking the entire matter too lightly. As evidence of that, city officials cited the lack of cleanup payments to the city, as well as Wind River’s absence at an update meeting a couple weeks ago where state officials were present.
Larson said though no payments had been made to the city itself, “There have been some ongoing health and welfare payments to people who were displaced until we could get their homes cleaned up. Those have been ongoing for several months.”
As to his company skipping out on the recent meeting, “I think maybe what people don’t understand is that Wasatch Environmental is our representative on the ground, and they’re on the ground every day talking to the people. We’ve got the best expert we know hired to get the thing cleaned up quickly,” Larson said.
Wasatch’s representative in Gunnison, Les Penington, was in attendance at that update meeting.