Thursday, January 27, 2011

Residents Unsympathetic to Gas Station Owner at Benzene Remediation Site

Benzene Contamination
by Duane Craig

Apparently a gas station in the Breckenridge Colorado, area is raising some ire from the community for its unkempt and environmentally questionable demeanor. Benzene contamination is on the site of the Sav-O-Mat gas station in Silverthorne.

Fortunately, so far, the benzene has not contaminated water wells or reached the nearby Blue River. The owner of the gas station is supposed to produce a site plan before remediation can get started but he has not done that. At a recent town council meeting, the owner showed up to discuss keeping a sign that’s not up to town code, continuing to access his property over town land and keeping another access way that is not up to code.

The council was not in the mood to talk about the issues since the site plan still was not forthcoming. Meanwhile remediation continues on the town property next to the gas station.

Commenters to the story unanimously supported a boycott of the business to force it to close, claiming the bathrooms are dirty, water gets into the underground gas storage tanks when it rains, and the owner continues stalling on cleaning up contamination even after the government steps in.

Read the local story and comments about the Benzene story here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As is the case with nearly every State, there must be some Sstate cleup money to address this mess! I have worked on similer sites in the Northeast. The owner has to do nothing but hired a qualified licensed professional engineer that knows how to access the stste cleaup funds. Site could be cleaned up in less than one year!