James “Bones” and Madeline “Micky” Wallace share their kitchen table with a device to measure gas fumes in their home. The couple will be forced to leave due to health problems resulting from the fumes.

Gas-leak related illness forces couple from home
By John Hales
11-14-07

GUNNISON—Last October, James and Madeleine Wallace, better known as Bones and Mickey, left their home near St. George to escape the traffic and moved to Gunnison.
Now, just a year later, the couple is faced with moving again, this time to escape gas fumes that are making Mickey quite ill.
“It’s so bad that we have to leave our home. It’s killing me that we might have to leave,” Mickey said on Monday.
Bones said there was no “might” about it. “We’re leaving it today,” he responded to his wife. “I want you to get to feeling better.”
Some time ago, Mickey began having nausea and headaches. Recently, those symptoms have included vomiting, disorientation and short-term memory loss.
Since last October, when they first moved into their home just east of Top Stop, they say they could smell gas fumes. After last summer’s fuel spill, and after a remediation system began ventilating fumes from the soil into the air, the fumes got worse.
So did Mickey’s symptoms.
After visiting their doctor, the Wallaces were told they would have to move if the fumes continued.
The Wallaces said when they went to the doctor and told the receptionist why they were there and what they thought was causing it, “The receptionist said, ‘You’re not the only ones.’”
Doctors’ offices have reported increases in complaints of symptoms such as Mickey has had.
The Wallaces and others are furious that nothing has been done about it before now, that the seriousness of the leak was known, but that local and state health officials sloughed off the problem onto other people, and didn’t truly get involved until the issue hit the big-time media last week.
Only then did health officials visit the area to give information and suggestions to residents who might be suffering from effects of the leak, and only then, they say, did the environmental consultant supervising the cleanup, Wasatch Environmental, install collection canisters in homes in the area to test for gas fumes.
“It’s like they really don’t care,” said Dick Townsley, who lives two doors east of the Wallaces and whose wife, Joy, has suffered the same symptoms to the extent of being confined to bed and a wheelchair.
“At this point, I’m getting really mad. There’s a problem here, and someone needs to do something about it.”
Townsley and the Wallaces are among several who have lost trust in just about everyone that has had anything to do with managing any aspect of the situation.
“They act like they don’t care about the citizens,” Mickey said. “They just care about the expense. I think they’re trying to cover it up.”
The Wallaces, Townsleys and other residents affected by the fuel leak were invited to a town meeting Tuesday. A report of that meeting will be in next week’s Sanpete Messenger.