For more than a decade, some residents of the tiny Richmond, Rhode Island, neighborhood of Canob Park drank and bathed using tap water that had been tainted by gasoline that leaked from storage tanks buried under service stations a few hundred yards from their homes. They spent years battling oil companies, dealing with the daily misery of boiling most of their water and wondering about lasting damage to themselves and their children.
The average cost to clean up a site is $154,000, according to the Association of State and Territorial Solid Waste Management Officials, an organization that acts as a liaison between state and territorial leaking underground storage tank programs and the EPA. But that cost can be much higher or lower depending on how much work is needed. The owners of tanks are supposed to carry insurance and pay for cleanup, but that doesn’t always happen.