Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 14, 1995 TAG: 9505150002
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PAW CREEK, N.C. LENGTH: Long
"Uh huh, uh huh, yeah," he said into the receiver, and glanced out his office window.
Seconds later, fire trucks and hazardous-material response vehicles screamed down the road and turned into the oil tank farms across the street.
Cloninger thanked the caller and hung up. "They busted a daggone line is what they done," he said as he bolted out the door.
On the scene, officials first said that excavation workers discovered a small puddle of petroleum near several buried pipelines that serve the massive storage tank farm in Paw Creek, on the outskirts of Charlotte, N.C. They pegged the spill at 10 to 15 gallons.
Cloninger was skeptical. Standing several hundred feet away, he sniffed the air. The odor of gasoline was unmistakable, despite the constant breeze.
It later turned out that 1,600 gallons of gasoline had leaked from a line belonging to Crown Central Petroleum.
At 57, Cloninger, a retired railroad worker and citizen watchdog, has become a self-taught expert on the perils of petroleum and how living near an above-ground storage tank farm can sometimes prove lethal.
Cloninger blames high levels of benzene - a cancer-causing component of refined oil - for his wife's death in December.
"Not only has it killed Kathy, it's killed a lot of her friends, and a lot of my friends," Cloninger said, reciting the names and ages of people who've died of cancer in this low-income neighborhood and the number of children they've left behind.
Cloninger is president of the Paw Creek Environmental Health and Safety Committee, formed two years ago by people in the community who wanted answers. By now, they've learned enough to know they want the oil companies out of Paw Creek, for good.
Built on a former farm during the 1940s, the oil terminal stores petroleum shipped via underground pipeline from Texas for distribution to retailers - the same line that supplies the Montvale tank farms in Bedford County, Va. The Paw Creek complex sprawls along several modest streets, giant tanks sitting within a stone's throw of porches and backyards. It's three times the size of the Montvale farm, and 20 years older.
People grew accustomed to the Paw Creek tanks; some even moved into the neighborhood. None suspected, however, that the oil was polluting their air and water.
"It would be a rainbow in the commode," said Terry Love, describing the oil sheen that crept up the sewer lines to her home. "I never thought, never for a minute. See, we didn't know. That's how stupid we were."
But too many friends started dying of breast cancer and other cancers, said Jean Castle, another community organizer. "Us women, we all started putting two and two together and realized there was something seriously wrong out there."
They discovered that over the years, an estimated 600,000 gallons of petroleum had seeped into the ground. Some of the pollution was documented in reports from the oil companies to the North Carolina Department of Environment, Health and Natural Resources. Some was not.
"There are some cases of spills in the 1960s that were not reported," agency spokesman Don Reuter said.
About 400,000 gallons have been recovered, according to the state. Still, contamination was so bad that officials found 11 feet of "free product," or undissolved oil in the ground water, under a former school.
"We had no idea ... where the contamination had reached off site," spokeswoman Debbie Crane said.
State and county officials tested hundreds of drinking wells, and found a couple with petroleum contamination. By last year, all but a few Paw Creek homes had been hooked up to city supplies, some at the oil companies' expense.
The state also found that the cancer rate in Paw Creek was on par with the rest of the state. However, toxicologists did find an elevated level of benzene in the air, and a slightly higher number of leukemia deaths. Benzene is a component of gasoline and has been linked to that type of cancer.
Don Mitchell, a spokesman for Exxon, one of the companies at Paw Creek, said the study also noted that the air in Paw Creek was comparable to that in downtown Charlotte, which is better than many other parts of the country.
"But most people think there's a cloud of benzene over the community, which is not the case," Mitchell said.
He concedes that, as a whole, the oil industry's relations with the public have been less than desirable. But the companies are trying to change that, he said.
"We're trying to replace fear in the community with facts. We're trying to do the right thing."
Part of that effort was the negotiation of a "first of its kind" cooperative agreement with North Carolina in which 11 of the 14 oil companies volunteered to clean up the worst ground-water pollution and prevent further environmental damage at the terminal. Under the terms of the pact, which goes beyond the state's regulations, the companies hired a single consultant, and will share copies of all reports with the community.
But Bob Cloninger and others in the citizens' group aren't happy with the Paw Creek pact because they weren't involved in the negotiations. And the pact gives them nothing, they say.
They have a lawsuit ready that seeks millions in damages and medical costs, and forces the oil companies to offer to buy homes within a two-mile radius.
For Cloninger, any such settlement will be too little, too late. He's lost his wife, spent a good deal of his own time and money to battling the oil companies and regulators, and now he says he's tuckered out.
In March, Cloninger found out the benzene levels in his blood are one-third higher than normal environmental exposure.
"Don't trust any of the oil companies," he advised other communities with tank farms. "Don't take their word for anything, and I mean that."
by CNB