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This website is authored by Lester Levy, Esq.
a founding member of JAMS.

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You are here: Home / Archives for NJTV

A Crisis in New Jersey with Underground Storage Tanks

December 16, 2015 by Lester Levy 1 Comment

underground storage tanksNew Jersey Public Television (NJTV) recently completed a broadcast of a three-part expose on the dangers and difficulties stemming from as many as 100,000 underground storage tanks that remain in the ground throughout the state.  In very stark terms the NJTV report warns that some of the sites are “nightmares” and “environmental ticking time bombs”, posing an immediate threat of contamination from seepage into ground water and basements in heavily populated areas.

These old storage tanks, both above and underground, are from homes, gas stations and dry cleaning sites – closed or currently in operation – where the chemicals have leaked over time.  The chemicals include fuel, PCP (dry cleaning fluid) or VOCs like degreasers and other chemicals used in automotive or other manufacturing sites.  As storage tanks are prone to corrosion, some of the chemicals have leaked into the soils and then leached into the groundwater.  This is true of almost every tank that was built or installed more than ten to fifteen years ago, when the technology was changed to build tanks with several layers of protection.  Often neighboring businesses’ tanks release chemicals into the soil which then leaches into the groundwater and combine to form “plumes” of contamination in the ground water, which flow with the groundwater in underground channels to other properties.  One of the main concerns is that these plumes of contamination can reach areas where drinking water wells draw water from the contaminated groundwater or where the chemicals in the plume “off gas” as vapor upwards through the soil into buildings and homes.  These scenarios present very real risks to human health and welfare.

All expletives aside, the problems and risks stemming from these buried and abandoned underground storage tanks perfectly illustrate the reason we need a new approach to solve long-standing environmental cleanup problems.  As the NJTV reporters observed, the NJ Department of Environmental Protection is simply overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem.  Given budget limitations and the protracted legal process involved when regulators move to compel cleanup, the NJ DEP has essentially been performing radical triage, focusing its resources on the situations needing immediate attention, which likely will result in the vast majority of these storage tanks remaining in the ground – and the contamination remaining in the groundwater — for many years to come. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Mediation vs. Litigation Tagged With: contamination, environmental mediation, New Jersey pollution, NJTV, waste storage tanks

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About Me

lester-levy

I strongly believe in the value of mediation – said another way, environmental mediation really works. I would go even further: I believe that environmental disputes are perfectly suited to the mediation process – perhaps more so than any other area of legal practice. I have formed these views after mediating environmental cases for more than 20 years, throughout the United States, and having worked with thousands of lawyers, companies, insurance carriers, regulatory agencies and courts. My … Read more

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