Keith Fraser
Province
Susan Aldred, song Michael and daughter Sarah stand outside the West Vancouver home where Aldred paid $160,000 to clean up damage from an old oil tank. Ric Ernst – The Province
A North Shore woman is suing the former owners of a home in West Vancouver after she shelled out more than $160,000 to remove 5,000 litres of contaminated fuel from a leaky home-heating oil tank buried in her backyard.
Susan Aldred says she discovered the tank when she decided to sell her home on Mathers Avenue in February. She wonders how many other homeowners are similarly unaware of such a problem.
The tank had not been used for about 25 years and was buried up against the house on a steep slope with flowing underground water.
The mother of two says that when she bought the property in 2000, the vendors told her they had removed the tank.
“I had no idea there was a tank because there was no piping or anything like that. So there was no way I would have known that there was an oil tank on my property.”
When the tank was opened there was an overpowering smell of oil.
It was full of sand, oil and water, says a statement of claim filed in B.C. Supreme Court.
The clean-up job took 2 1/2 months and Aldred says though she sold the house, the completion of the contract has not yet gone through.
She says in the statement of claim that her young daughter did not eat anything for nine days while the oil smell was strongest and lost a considerable amount of weight.
Her young son also suffered from a loss of appetite and nausea and she had violent headaches and nausea.
She is suing for damages, including punitive damages as well as costs to remove the tank and contamination.
Richard Lambert of Digger Dick’s Contracting did the clean-up.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time and this was the worst remediation site I’ve ever seen,” he said. “It was literally astonishing how much damage had been done.”
He said his crews had to remove 456 tons of contaminated material.
And Aldred is not alone, he added.
“This is as bad as the leaky condo crisis. I see it on a daily basis.”
Martin Ernst, division fire chief at the West Vancouver Fire Department, said the department launched a program in 1989 to eliminate the tanks installed in the 1940s and 1950s.
Since then the department has been able to cut the numbers down by 1,000 but about 4,000 still remain, he said.
Ernst said it was rare to get a bill as high as Aldred’s; they are generally in the $30,000 to $40,000 range.
“Susan’s case, I hope it’s not a harbinger of things to come because people have left their tanks and not dealt with them,” Ernst said.
“I have to give homeowners a bit of a break here because a lot of them don’t even know they have a tank. I would say 50 per cent of them don’t know they have a tank.”
Tank contractors find that 75 per cent of the jobs have contamination problems, said Ernst.
“That’s very worrying. You can imagine if you are a purchaser and you buy a property and hidden under the ground is potentially 300 to 900 gallons of oil that may have leaked into the soil. With ground water pushing up, at some point that oil reaches the surface. That’s a lot of oily product that is believed to be carcinogenic and environmentally damaging.”
Jim Sullivan, a lawyer for Alexander and Lynda Colbeck, the previous owners, said: “With regard to homes that have underground oil tanks, these matters do arise and are difficult for everyone who has been involved in ownership of the home. Is the action going to be contested? Right now it is. Do the Colbecks think they are legally responsible for this? No, they don’t.”
What to do
There could be an underground nightmare lurking in your backyard.
And if it’s in the form of an oil storage tank, or RUST, then you’d better deal with it now, rather than later.
The tanks were installed in the 1940s to the ’60s to store heating oil. Now they may be leaking carcinogenic substances into ground water — and that could cost you big time when it comes to removing them.
The B.C. Fire Code demands the tanks be removed and have an environmental engineer assess any damage.
Cost can range from $2,000 to $5,000 as long as there are no problems.
The sky seems to be the limit if there is environmental damage. There are no government programs to help with the cost.
Check with your municipality on what needs to be done.