Cleaning Up US Fuel Tank Leaks Costs $12 Billion - GAO
WASHINGTON - Cleaning up about half of the 117,000 leaking underground fuel storage tanks nationwide will cost the public about $12 billion, Congress' investigative arm said in a report released Thursday. Inaction "places human health and the environment at an increased risk."
Dingell said the federal government has been too slow to tap the Leaking Underground Storage Tank Trust Fund, or LUST, a federal cleanup pool set aside in 1986 to aide state cleanups.
The pool, funded by a tenth-of-a-cent per gallon federal tax on gasoline, will hit a $3 billion surplus at the end of the 2008 fiscal year.
The US Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the cleanup program, estimates that per-site cleanups cost an average $125,000.
EPA and the states have spent more than $10 billion over 20 years to clean up spills but more than 100,000 releases have not yet been cleaned up.
The number of sites needing cleanup could rise dramatically. The GAO said that states were unable to estimate costs for 8,000 sites, and 43 states expected to confirm nearly 17,000 new releases in the next five years that would require public funds to clean up.
Costs can also rise dramatically if sites are contaminated with methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, a fuel additive no longer in widespread use that has contaminated water supplies in dozens of states, rendering it undrinkable.
Over half of the 14,800 sites on California's cleanup backlog involve MTBE contamination, said Rep. Hilda Solis, the California Democrat who also requested the GAO investigation.
Average California per site cleanup costs is about $174,000 in public funds, which rises to about $583,000 when MTBE is present, Solis said.
"This report shows clearly that the leaking underground storage tanks are not getting cleaned up,"