The Virginia General Assembly is poised to mandate more stringent safety standards for above-ground storage tanks at the controversial Pickett Road tank farm in Fairfax City, which has plagued the surrounding neighborhood with oil leaks since the early 1990s. The companion bills, introduced by Del. David Bulova, D-Fairfax, and Sen. Chap Petersen, D-Fairfax, would require tank-farm owners to restore tanks built prior to 1992 to conform to current design requirements, such as having double bottoms, to prevent leaks. “It’s been an ongoing problem for years,” Petersen said. “You have a petroleum tank farm which is located literally in the middle of a residential neighborhood.”
Indeed, in the early 1990s, a massive oil plume leaking from a tank at the site spread into the neighboring Mantua neighborhood, prompting Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., then president of the Mantua Citizens Association, to coordinate efforts to clean up the spill.
Bulova said the “great irony” of the situation was that the leak prompted Virginia to adopt more stringent above-ground tank regulations, but those rules do not apply to tanks built prior to 1992, including those at the troubled tank farm.
“Even at the tank farm today, there are a number of tanks that are single-bottom and don’t have release-prevention barriers,” Bulova said.
Indeed, problems have continued since the spill about two decades ago. Thousands of gallons of fuel leaked underground in early 2010, and, last August, a tanker truck flipped and spilled more than 4,000 gallons of diesel fuel, some of which trickled directly into Accotink Creek.
Five companies — BP, Citgo, Motiva, TransMontaigne, and Colonial Pipeline — own property and operate their respective facilities at the site. About half of the tanks at the site have already been upgraded, according to Fairfax City Fire Marshal Andrew Wilson. A representative for TransMontaigne, the company that discovered a diesel fuel leak in January 2010, could not be reached for comment.
Connolly recently called on the Environmental Protection Agency to “take all possible administrative steps to prevent additional spills and, if possible, shut down the tank farm permanently.”
“Any owner of a tank farm with this record of multiple oil spills should have either cleaned up its act or shut down, but this tank farm continues to endanger our neighborhood,” he wrote to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
