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Tanks
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ance must be carried by the distributor or owner® case of hazardous gasoline spilla, leakage. or other forms of soil, water and air pollution.
These two criteria — upgrading and insurance — are often prohibitively expensive, hence the tanks are removed and, in Ralph Peyton’s case, the store is closed due to loss of business. »
“They took the pumps out the first of March,” Mr. Peyton said, standing amid the emptiness that was his business for the last nine years on the comer of U.S. 211 and Route 729 at in Ben Venue. His gas distributor was L.R. Waters in Culpeper.
Business started going “steadily downhill” from the point when the tanks were removed in March and in July, Peyton and his wife, Esther, stood by while store merchandise and supplies were auctioned off to the highest bidder.
‘It was not economical to keep the tanks,” W. Erskine Bankhead of L.R. Waters in Culpeper said. Mr. Bankhead has directed the gasoline company since 1961 when its founder and Mr. Bankhead’s father-in-law, Leon Waters, stepped down.
Recently, L.R. Waters merged with Quarles Oil Co. in Culpeper. Mr. Bankhead said the merger was in part due to the extreme demands the new law has placed on all gasoline distribution companies, affecting smaller ones like his own the most drastically.
“Small companies aren’t prepared to handle all these things,” Mr. Bankhead said, adding his company would be consumed by the high insurance premiums and liability costs.
With the costs of upgrading the tanks running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and annual insurance costs estimated at $4,600 per site for one to 14 tanks, Mr. Bankhead said his company had no choice but to remove the Ben Venue Store’s tanks.
The decision came as a surprise to the Peytons, past owners of several stores and presently running Eklwood Store in Culpeper and Ben Venue until late June.
“We were given no notice,” Esther Peyton said, adding that several days before the tanks were removed from Ben Venue, the distribution company contacted them saying the tanks were to be taken out.
“We thought we were alright,” Mr. Peyton said, referring to the new law and the fact that his tanks were only nine years old. The tanks were placed in the ground when Mr. Peyton began business at the store in 1981.
In Flint Hill, intead of closing Settle’s Garage and their store, Esther and Richard Settle invested in
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