Detect oil tanks before they leak

Lurking undetected under lawns, old heating-oil tanks are quietly seeping misery and financial ruin into the lives of Victoria homeowners. Anyone who lives in an older home feels a clutch of fear in reading the story of neighbours Gina Dolinsky and Gavin Edwards. Dolinsky has spent $30,000 and Edwards $60,000 cleaning up oil that leaked from a buried tank in Edwards’s yard. And it’s not over yet.

The two neighbours, like most Victorians, don’t have insurance to cover such spills.

Their neighbour Terry Phillips was luckier, although no one in his situation would use that term. The leak on his property was caused by an oil-company worker filling a disconnected tank, so the company’s insurance covered the cost of flattening his house and cleaning up the mess. He’s not sure he wants to build again on the site.

All three have been through a nightmare, with Dolinsky reluctantly having to sue Edwards for her costs.

Some might say that Edwards should have checked for tanks before he bought the house. He did. He even hired a company to scan the yard for buried tanks, but they didn’t find the one that was there.

That makes it even scarier. You could take all the reasonable steps and still wind up responsible for an environmental disaster.

It’s a problem that will only get worse as tanks that were only supposed to last 20 or 25 years age and deteriorate.

It is unfair that homeowners are saddled with mammoth bills for a mess they didn’t create and can’t get insurance for. The insurance companies can’t be blamed for running away from such a risk.

However, we can’t expect governments to pick up the cost, either.

The provincial government says that in some cases where the homeowner did his or her best to find out if a tank existed, they might be relieved of any provincial costs. But in Edwards’s case, the province paid only a small part; he would still be on the hook for the bills from private contractors, Saanich’s expenses and Dolinsky’s lawsuit.

So homeowners must expect that if a spill happens, they are on their own.

Preventing a spill by finding and decommissioning the old tank is the best and cheapest course, but as Edwards found, it’s not easy.

Some agencies are grappling with the issue, including the township of Esquimalt, the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Clinic and the Victoria Real Estate Board. Their recommendations include inspecting tanks regularly, and requiring heating-system installers to ensure old tanks are decommissioned properly.

Those are sound ideas, but they only work for tanks whose location is known. The more serious problem is the hidden tanks, like Edwards’s.

Municipalities usually require a permit for any tank that is removed or decommissioned, so they can be recorded, but no municipal records were kept when tanks were installed. Without records, new homeowners rely on the memories of previous owners or scans of the ground, which don’t always work if concrete or paving stones have been laid over the site.

If an older home was torn down to make way for a new one, that could be a red flag to start hunting for a possible underground tank.

We can’t expect governments to foot the bill for cleanups, but since the problem is only going to get worse, it’s in everyone’s interest for the province and municipalities to investigate ways to find and record hidden oil tanks.

The job is not impossible. Many tanks were aboveground or indoors, so their locations are known. Tanks that have been removed are recorded. That reduces the number of potentially hidden ones.

Finding them could be cheaper than waiting until they ambush more homeowners.