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Ticking Time Bomb - Oil Storage Tanks In The Basement Of Office and Apartment Buildings
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Added: 09/20/2004
Type: Summary
Viewed: 841 time(s)
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Ticking Time Bomb - Oil Storage Tanks In The Basement Of Office and Apartment Buildings
September 20, 2004 -- The building manager showed his concern in the tone of his voice when he called. The 10,000 gallon heating oil tank in the basement of his eight story apartment building was emitting a strong odor of fuel oil throughout the building basement. The concern was that the tank, situated in a walled off area and installed when the building was built some fifty years earlier, could be leaking oil into the ground.
The next day a tech crew determined that the tank was in fact leaking slightly, but that because of how the tank was set and the small amount of oil that had permeated at this early stage, there had not been a chance for ground contamination to take place. The building’s owners were lucky - they had dodged the bullet. “This is not always the case”, reports Jeff Colner of Armor Shield Tank Services, “many older fuel oil tanks are partially or fully buried or sealed and releases of oil can’t be detected by odor. Many times it’s not until ground contamination is discovered or a minor permeation grows into a major leak, that the problem is detected.”
Colner continued, “Thousands of apartment and office buildings throughout the United States have older steel oil storage tanks in or below their basements or sub-basements. Many of these oil tanks were installed at the time the buildings were built in the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's and they are much larger than doors, stairs and hallways connecting their location to the outside, making it almost impossible to remove and replace them intact. With age these tanks can deteriorate and leak fuel oil into the ground. New technologies now make it easy and cost efficient to refurbish these tanks in place, saving thousands of dollars in replacement costs and virtually eliminating potential pollution problems.”
Colner is a veteran with steel tanks and their problems. Armor Shield Tank Lining and Repair deals with the problems inherent to older gasoline, fuel oil and chemical storage tanks. With state of the art equipment and materials, he and his associates go right inside of steel tanks, sand blasting, repairing and then virtually making a fiberglass and plastic tank on the interior of the older steel tank. He added, “Corrosion is a funny animal, and the overall structural integrity of most of the steel tanks we examine is almost as good as the day it was installed. The problems come from isolated corrosion cells making minute permeations through the steel shell of the tank. Allowed to grow, these corrosion permeations can go from a minor weeping to a quarter inch hole if not addressed. A lot of oil can escape from a small hole, and it doesn’t take a tanker load to cause a pollution problem.”
He explained, “The refurbishing is sort of like a tank in a tank approach. The fiberglass and plastic lining we fabricate inside the steel tank adds an additional structural wall and is not subject to corrosion. The sandblasting process conditions the interior steel tank wall before we add the fiberglass and plastic. This helps guard against future internal corrosion problems.”
When asked about what the long-term effect of a leaking tank and the environmental cleanup process, he responded, “We don’t do environmental studies or cleanups, so I wouldn’t comment about that. It’s our job to find minor problems, or situations before they become problems, and remedy them, before you get to the point of needing environmental services.”
When asked about the costs related to the process, he commented, “Depending on the size and location of a tank, it can run from 10% to 30% of the final costs related to replacing a tank.” He continued, “What we do isn’t rocket science, it’s just good, sound engineering process.”
The Armor Shield Tank Lining and Repair Network operates across the country, from a dozen applicator locations. The network has lined and repaired over 100,000 tanks since 1967. Call the Armor Shield Hotline at (888) 839-0373 for immediate information or email to info@armorshieldlining.com. Visit the Armor Shield Tank Lining website at www.armorshieldlining.com .
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