Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 15, 1995 TAG: 9505160030
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICHARD FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Why? Because the government checks them.
Contrary to what many residents believe, however, state and federal agencies responsible for overseeing the tanks seldom come on site unless there's been a spill. Only Bedford County requires regular on-site inspections at the tank farms.
And as a watchdog, the county's been asleep in Montvale.
A county ordinance to make the tank farms safer requires the building inspector to make monthly checks of alarms that warn of overflows at each of the six oil tank farms in Montvale. That means the county should make 72 inspections each year. But that's more than the total number of inspections the county has made in the past three years.
From 1992 to 1994, the county made 69 alarm checks - 52 in 1992, 15 in 1993 and only two in 1994.
Alarms on tanks owned by Amoco, Citgo, Chevron and Star Enterprise were not inspected by the county at all last year.
The ordinance also requires oil companies to have employees on-site one hour before and after receiving gasoline by pipeline. But the county has no way of checking to make sure that happens because it doesn't require oil companies to notify it when pipeline shipments - many of them in the middle of the night - are made.
"Like so many of our ordinances, they're almost impossible to enforce," said Bedford County Supervisor Gus Saarnijoki, who represents Montvale.
Bedford County passed its tank-farm ordinance in 1983, a year after a 62,500-gallon spill at Amoco's terminal.
The spill happened when an overflow alarm failed while Amoco was receiving gas from an underground pipeline. Because the late-night shipment was controlled by computer, no one was present to see the spill.
The next morning, Montvale was a mess. A dense cloud of gasoline vapors hung in the air over U.S. 460. Citizens were warned not to smoke. Students were temporarily evacuated from Montvale Elementary School.
The terminal manager at the time admitted that the overfill system had been out of commission for months because it had developed problems. Local officials downplayed the event, saying that other schools had hazards, and other industries in the county had chemicals. Montvale's situation was no worse, they said.
But angry citizens pressured the Board of Supervisors, which passed the ordinance a year later.
Enforcing the ordinance is the job of the county building inspector, who is given the powers of a fire inspector.
Most of the county's alarm-inspection records before 1992 have been destroyed. Inspections from 1983 to 1992 were "spotty," Saarnijoki said.
When Saarnijoki learned in 1992 that alarms weren't being inspected, he scolded then-Chief Building Inspector Keith Stevens and warned him to get on the ball.
Apparently Stevens didn't heed Saarnijoki's warning. Saarnijoki adds, "I didn't go back and check. That's not the way I do things. I complain [only] once."
Stevens quit in January last year to take a job with the town of Altavista.
"I'm not going to say [checking the alarms] wasn't a priority, but there's not but so many hours in the day," Stevens said. "We were issuing 1,800 building permits a year, and 600 or so were new houses and needed inspections.
"Time got pretty scarce" for the alarm checks, he said.
When he went to the tank farms, Stevens would check "the bells and whistles" that went off when terminal operators triggered the alarms, but he wouldn't check to see if the emergency valves worked.
Stevens' successor, Joseph "Tom" Tomsic, has scheduled monthly checks for this year and has stuck to them. He dismissed the county's spotty track record, saying, "I just worry about my watch. Whatever went on before me doesn't concern me."
Last year, though, after he became chief inspector, only two of the 72 required inspections were made - and both of those came in December. Four oil companies didn't have their alarms checked at all.
Tomsic said he asked terminal managers to check the alarms, instead of testing them himself. "Right now I have the manpower that I can oversee [the inspections]. But if we get bogged down, I plan on using my prerogative as fire marshal to take a third-person inspection again."
His department has four inspectors to handle more than 2,000 building permits each year. The Board of Supervisors has turned down Tomsic's requests for extra help.
"Even if the county failed to keep their inspection schedule, there's so many other people checking those alarms, we're just duplicating what other people are doing," Tomsic said, adding that he believed the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Quality also check the alarms regularly.
However, neither agency checks high-level alarms at the tank farms.
Tomsic, who has worked for the county since 1986, also apparently didn't know that the county requires the oil companies to keep employees at their terminals during pipeline receipts - or that it's his job to make sure they do so.
"There is no county requirement," Tomsic said. "We don't tell them how to run their businesses and that's totally their internal procedures. I can imagine Bedford County telling Amoco how to run their terminals,'' he said sarcastically. "Their [company rules] are more stringent than anything we could come up with."
Asked later about the ordinance, Tomsic contradicted himself, saying he knew there was a requirement to staff the terminals.
Stevens said he thinks some good has come out of the ordinance. "A couple of operations up there were the bad boys on the block. They weren't even following their own regulations. But everybody up there cleaned up their act when the ordinances were passed."
The oil companies now repair their alarms within days, instead of weeks, Stevens said.
Some residents, however, expressed skepticism that any good has come from the ordinance.
The Rev. A.C. Holland, who lives and preaches in Montvale, was a leader in the fight years ago to get more county control over the tank farms. When told that the county has been slack in its duties, Holland said: "What will happen is, we'll have another incident and then it will all come out again."
Staff Writer Cathryn McCue contributed information for this story.
by CNB