Fouled lot will stay that way

"More than a decade after the Union 76 gas station near the ferry terminal was torn down, petroleum still laces the site's soil and groundwater - with no plans for cleanup in sight.Under the cleanup laws, (station owners) have to report when contamination occurs, and they have to come up with a focus study, said Washington State Department of Ecology spokesman Curt Hart. But there is nothing that requires the cleanup to be done in a certain amount of time.Sitting at the southwest corner of Highway 305 and Winslow Way, the lot and its chain-link fence, brightened by children's paintings of ferries and island landmarks, has become a familiar fixture for commuters."

“More than a decade after the Union 76 gas station near the ferry terminal was torn down, petroleum still laces the site’s soil and groundwater – with no plans for cleanup in sight.Under the cleanup laws, (station owners) have to report when contamination occurs, and they have to come up with a focus study, said Washington State Department of Ecology spokesman Curt Hart. But there is nothing that requires the cleanup to be done in a certain amount of time.Sitting at the southwest corner of Highway 305 and Winslow Way, the lot and its chain-link fence, brightened by children’s paintings of ferries and island landmarks, has become a familiar fixture for commuters.Workers installed the fence, removed buildings and underground gasoline tanks and extracted escaped petroleum products on the lot 11 years ago. But today, gasoline and benzene remain – in subsurface soils and the water table 30 feet underground – at concentrations higher than allowed under state regulations.Although these pollutants are toxic and carcinogenic, Hart said, the DOE has not required a cleanup because monitoring wells have shown that tainted water has not seeped away from the property.It hasn’t posed a high enough risk to human health, Hart said, nor has (contamination) entered the (surrounding) environment.Five years ago, officials from Union Oil Company of California (Unocal), which owns Union 76 stations, notified Bainbridge Island city officials of its cleanup studies. But since then, little work has occurred on the property.The company has delayed the cleanup, said Unocal senior environmental engineer Kipp Eckert, because the depth of contamination makes remediation of that site much more difficult.Unocal property manager Rick Tackett said the company may seek a buyer who would clean up the site as part of a purchase agreement.If a buyer had plans to install underground parking on the property, he said, that would facilitate a cleanup simultaneous with development.But Unocal has no immediate plans to place the lot on the market, Tackett said.We’ve gotten some inquiries on the property, he said, but nothing that we have agreed to or pursued diligently.Said Hart: It’s risky what (Unocal) is doing, because if for any reason these contaminants were to migrate offsite onto anyone’s property, they will be liable.The high-profile corner, in Winslow’s urban core, is zoned for commercial or multi-family uses, and with underground parking, could someday see buildings up to four stories high.But its future uses are somewhat dubious. The Union 76 station closed precisely because – 15 minutes out of every hour – ferry-related traffic prevented customers from reaching the gas pumps, station operators told the Review in 1989.While development has changed the surrounding landscape over the past decade, the property has remained essentially unaltered and will stay fenced off for the foreseeable future, company officials said.Nor should islanders expect the DOE to require a cleanup on the property anytime soon, Hart said, because it’s a matter of really trying to use our limited resources to tackle those sites that pose a greater risk than this site.Statewide, DOE must deal with more than 8,000 contaminated properties, he said, adding that fouled service station lots are not at all unusual.It’s fairly common to encounter contaminated soils in a gas station site, said Hart, who was reluctant to assign blame to the petroleum companies alone.They were there for a reason, he said, and that was to sell oil and gasoline to the public who demanded it…We all bear responsibility there, as long as we continue to use internal combustion engines in our cars.”