Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 6, 1993 TAG: 9310060051
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RON BROWN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But Tim Liptak, an environmental specialist for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, said such caps are not routinely inspected by state authorities.
The condition of the cap is a central issue in a dispute over who is responsible for a 2,000-gallon kerosene spill Monday morning into a tributary of the Roanoke River.
State regulations call for the cap to be properly marked and secured to prevent tampering. State officials said they have not required the caps to be locked.
A truck driver said he dumped a load of kerosene through the fill cap after receiving instructions from a Crown employee at the company's Franklin Road store. The store maintains that the driver should have known better, because caps on the store's filler tanks are color-coordinated.
Environmental cleanup crews were working through the day Tuesday to removed debris from the spill, which traveled about one-eighth of a mile before being stopped by Roanoke firefighters.
While human error is being blamed for the spill, the legal questions surrounding it revolve around whether negligence played a part.
State officials could be less harsh in their assessment if the spill was properly reported, and if the companies willingly clean up the damaged stream bed.
The responsible party could face up to $200,000 in fines in addition to paying for the cleanup. The city Fire Department already has received reimbursement for the supplies it used from Environmental Options Inc., the firm employed by Crown to conduct the cleanup.
State officials estimate that the cleanup will cost thousands of dollars. Crown initially has taken the responsibility of paying for the cleanup, but its management has said it believes the spill was caused by a delivery error on the part of the driver. Webb Oil Corp. was the company responsible for delivering the kerosene.
"We certainly will be issuing a notice of violation against somebody," said John Roland of the state Environmental Quality Department. "Who's to say if it was the property owner's fault or the driver's fault?"
Those issues aside, state officials say there's little question the law was broken.
"Certainly, we would say there was a violation of state law," said Dave Chance, ground-water remediation manager for the department. "We wouldn't say it's intentional."
The spill at Crown occured because the tanker-truck driver pumped kerosene into a monitoring well, which had no tank and was used by store officials solely to gauge whether the soil beneath it was being contaminated by a leaky tank.
"We don't check these covers," Liptak said. "We are assuming they are done properly, or we don't have the manpower to check every one of these monitoring-well caps."
He estimated there are thousands of monitoring-well caps throughout Virginia.
by CNB