Gas leak continues to impact residents
By Suzanne Dean
11-28-07

GUNNISON—While only one family, the Jeremy Taylors, are still evacuated from their home, and while measurements indicate gasoline vapors are diminishing, the huge Top Stop leak continues to impact human lives.
One of the starkest examples is Joyce and Richard Townley, owners of a home at 20 E. Center St., three doors east of where Top Stop was located.
Joyce, 63, an amputee who had health problems before the leak was reported, says that after months of constantly smelling gasoline fumes, her health declined, she was less able to walk around her house with her prosthesis, and her blood pressure rose.
When the fumes got really bad, her husband and son, who had no previous health problems, got headaches and nausea.
Joyce says her doctor told her, “You really need to leave.”
The Townleys got away to St. George for a while, and she started feeling better. They returned, and she started feeling ill again.
“Wind River has made it so I’m not safe in my own home,” she says.
The Townleys, who are both retired now from the Utah Department of Corrections, were assigned to Gunnison temporarily in 1990 to help open the Central Utah Correctional Facility. They decided to stay. Both retired with more than 20 years of service. But the past six years or so since they retired have been rife with troubles.
They planned to spend some years traveling, and bought a motor home and a membership in a motor home park association.
While parked at one of the association properties in St. George. Joyce fell in the motor home and broke her ankle. The break required surgery. Her surgical wounds became infected with the dreaded MRSA bacteria (the acronym stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which is resistant to penicillin and other antibiotics. She went through five more surgeries to try to cut out the infection. But the bacteria destroyed her bone, leading to amputation of her left leg below the knee.
Then the infection spread to her spine. She was Lifeflighted from St. George to the U. of U. Medical Center, where she nearly died.
The high fevers associated with the infection caused her right leg to develop “drop foot,” a condition where the foot locks in place and no longer flexes up and down. That has made walking with a prosthesis all the more difficult.
Joyce says medical and related costs maxed out their medicare and insurance benefits, and depleted their savings. Her prescriptions still run $600 per month.
In December, 2005, the couple came back to Gunnison. Despite their plans to travel in retirement, Joyce says, “We didn’t sell our home because that’s always been our safety net.”
Her strength started to return. “I was feeling good,” she says. “I was building up so I could walk around my home with a walker.” But about May, 2006, about three months before the gas leak was reported, she started to decline again.
On Aug. 10, Joyce says, Wind River ran a trench a few hundred feet up Center Street on the north side of Top Stop, installed a pipe and used a vacuum device to suck vapors into the pipe and from the pipe into the air. Joyce claims the filter on the vacuum device was burned out. Raw fumes from the pipe shot up into the air.
“There was never a let-up,” she says. That’s when her husband and son got sick, too.
About a week ago, Joyce says, Lance Hess, Gunnison City’s independent environmental consultant took readings in their home and got mixed results.
The Townleys would prefer to leave their home until all fumes are gone, but they can’t afford it, Joyce says. So far, they have not been offered any assistance.
Although Wind River Petroleum reported the leak to the state and initiated cleanup in August, Joyce says, “We smelled the gas long before that.”
In fact, she used to help out at Top Stop. The staff measured the gasoline in the tanks every morning, she says. Based on those measurements, Wind River had to know, long before August, that gasoline was going into the tanks that wasn’t being pumped out into vehicles, she says.
Wind River President J. Craig Larson says residents who need financial assistance should contact the city to set up a test.
“We’re ready to assist those who have a verifiable displacement situation,” he said. Larsen said the company had made payments to the Taylor family, who own a home at 255 S. 100 West, and to James and Madeleine Wallace, whose home is on Center Street right behind the Top Stop site, a couple of houses away from the Townleys. (The Wallaces returned to their home last week.)
Larson said environmental consultants for both Wind River and the city have checked out numerous homes, but the majority have tested negative for gas fumes.
Les Penington of Wasatch Environmnental, Wind River’s consulting firm, described his firm as being somewhere near the middle of overall cleanup efforts.
“Emission readings at the two SVE (soil vapor extraction) sites on the east and west sites of Main Streets have decreased 50 percent from when we started in late August,” he said.
Workers will construct additional trenches through backyards between 100 and 200 South and behind the Casino Star Theater, and will initiate additional extraction efforts at those locations.
Penington said SVEs would continue to operate until measurements show that vapor levels in the ground are low enough to meet state criteria.
“The investigation continues and more remediation may be required,” he said.