Gunnison seeking solutions to gas leak
By John Hales
11-14-07

GUNNISON—Gunnison City is showing indications that it is gearing up for a showdown with Top Stop and Top Stop’s environmental consultant, Wasatch Environmental, over last summer’s fuel spill and the subsequent handling of the matter.
Yesterday, in a special meeting of the city council, the city retained its attorney, Peter Stirba, to represent it specifically in “possible litigation against Wind River Petroleum,” Top Stop’s parent company.
In a public meeting following the action, Stirba explained what the city was doing to remedy the after-effects of a 20,000-30,000 gas leak from Top Stop’s underground storage tanks.
At that meeting, Stirba invited anyone who might have a damage claim as a result of the leak to join the city in retaining him, though he and the city stopped short of calling for a class-action lawsuit.
The meeting followed developments last week that showed the city was becoming dissatisfied with how Top Stop, Wasatch Environmental and even the state had dealt with the situation.
The city hired its own environmental consultant to provide analysis and information independent of Wasatch Environmental, and instructed the Stiba to begin collecting information from people affected by the spill. He requested that information from those who attended the meeting.
On Aug. 10, local and state officials ordered the evacuation of an entire Main Street block because of fumes from 20,000-30,000 gallons of gas that had leaked from Top Stop’s underground storage tanks.
The closure lasted only one day, and Wasatch Environmental installed underground soil-ventilation systems in the weeks following.
Until last week, when Jeremy Taylor—son of city council member Rod Taylor—and his family were evacuated from their home because of fumes from the underground leak, many city officials were content that the matter was being handled adequately, and were trustful of the information they were being given.
But after businesses began closing, presumably due to the leak either directly or indirectly, and when last week’s evacuation showed that the leak was indeed migrating, city officials took action, convinced that the situation was much more serious than they had been led to believe.
Also, now, there has been an increase in health complaints at local doctors’ offices, and doctors have directly ascribed those complaints as environmentally related. People have reported symptoms of nausea, headache, muscle ache, disorientation and vomiting. For one patient, Dr. Jan Christensen advised that “if the fumes are strong in her house, she should move somewhere else until the problem is resolved.”
That patient and her husband are now staying in a motel in Salina.
City council member Lori Nay is outraged at what the incident has caused, and at what she perceives as intentional downplaying of the situation.
“I’m so infuriated at this process, at this ‘let’s keep it on the down low,’” said city council member Lori Nay last Thursday. “We have more questions than answers here, and we’re going to take a very strong approach. This is going to get much bigger.”
Prior to last week, Nay’s had been the one voice on the city council raising a cry of warning that something wasn’t right, that the state wasn’t doing enough, and that since Wasatch worked for Top Stop, not the state, there was reason to not have blind faith in what the company was saying.
Nay pointed to several things that didn’t sit right with her.
First was that she’s convinced Top Stop knew about the leak, simply because of its size, sooner than when the company reported it to the state at the beginning of August.
She’s backed up by Therron Blatter, of the Department of Environmental Quality.
“The last number I heard was 20,000 gallons. It was in that ballpark. Either way, it’s a very big release,” Blatter said.
“You would think that someone would notice 15-20,000 gallons of their product that didn’t sell. In my mind, a reasonable person would have noticed that much loss.”
Especially when the tank in question could only hold 12,000 gallons, meaning that a loss of 20,000 gallons in a month surely required an additional delivery.
“Put yourself in their position, and you know that you’ve got two deliveries of 10,000 gallons each, and you only sold 8,000. It doesn’t add up, and it’s simple math,” he said.
“They were in compliance because they reported it as soon as they got a ‘fail’ on a test. But I’m not going to say that they were operating prudently or responsibly.”
Nay is also upset at what she feels is misrepresentation of the incident by Wasatch Environmental. Wasatch didn’t hide the actual size of the leak, estimating the aforementioned 20,000 gallons. But Wasatch, said Nay, never interpreted that number for the city in terms of how huge such a gas leak was.
“I’ve heard that the average gas leak is 500-600 gallons,” Nay said. “Our environmental consultant has been like, ‘Holy cow,’ at the sheer amount of fuel.
“Their whole mission is to minimize it because they only have $1million, and they know [the cleanup] is going to go way over that,” Nay said.
The $1 million she referred to is from a cleanup fund—called the Petroleum Storage Tank Fund, or PST—administered through the state Department of Environmental Quality that companies can tap into to recoup cleanup and remediation costs, after a $10,000 deductible.
Anything after that, Top Stop would be responsible for. Therefore, reasoned Nay, Top Stop has a vested interest to keep cleanup costs low, and to encourage Wasatch Environmental to do the same.
Nay questions why there hasn’t been an attempt to clean up the fuel, but to simply ventilate the contaminated soil, again implying that the driving factor is cost, rather than the health of the city, its environment and citizens.
Nay is also upset at what she sees as a lack of action on the part of the state.
She said the DEQ’s remediation and response team has sent her only one email in three months, what she sees as only a token attempt to keep the city updated.
She’s also disappointed by the state’s failure to investigate rumors that Top Stop’s corporate management knew about the gas leak quite some time before July’s big spill, possibly up to two years before.
Nay said she heard reports from former local Top Stop employees that they reported missing fuel, but that the corporate office either told them to not say anything about it, or may even have doctored records to cover it up.
The DEQ’s Therron Blatter said he heard the same reports when he and others from his section investigated the leak on site, and accordingly requested the Utah Attorney General’s Office to either confirm those reports or put an end to them.
The Attorney General’s Office, however, according to special agent Patty Ishmael, didn’t go very far with the investigation beyond looking at Top Stop’s own records.
“The investigation did not involve speaking to employees,” she said, adding that there is actually no criminal provision for simply failing to report a leak.