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Tanks
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The guidelines have already forced many wholesale petroleum distributors to close their accounts with thousands of merchants due to the high cost of the repair or replacement of tanks, mandatory leakage tests and required insurance against spills.
“It’s a matter of economics,” said Erskine Bankhead, president of L.R. Waters Inc., a distributor based in Culpeper. He explained that many distributors owned the tanks buried at the small general stores and rural service stations. Under the regulations, that made the distributors liable for the replacement of aging tanks and the mandatory insurance coverage.
Some distributors, he added, sold the tanks to the merchants, thereby transferring the responsibilities for compliance to the retail outlets.
Regardless of the ownership, however, compliance with the federal regulations carries a steep price tag. They require that each owner or user carry a $1 million pollution insurance policy, per tank, at a cost of between $3,000 and $7,000 per year, per tank.
“We can’t afford to carry the insurance on all the small places,” Mr. Bankhead said, “and they can’t either.”
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