[CPEO-MEF] San Antonio (TX) waste oil

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Toxic site cleanup haunts S.A. firms

Anton Caputo
San Antonio Express-News (TX)
July 3, 2006

Comet Fuel Center owner Roe Traugott thumbs through a pile of nearly 
two-decade-old waste oil receipts, all remnants of a time when his 
father's business sold used motor oil to a nearby recycling outfit 
called R&H Oil.

"Twenty-three dollars - I got rich on that one," he says, his voice 
tinged with irony.

The deals earned Traugott's father a little less than $50 over the years 
for 988 gallons of waste oil. That's about a nickel a gallon. Now the 
deals could cost his son more than 460 times that amount.

Since then, R&H Oil has declared bankruptcy and abandoned its South Side 
facility, littered with leaking drums and awash in waste oil. 
Environmental regulators swarmed the site in 2001, cleaned up what they 
could and proposed R&H for the Superfund program, which is reserved for 
the nation's worst hazardous waste sites. Now, they want people like 
Traugott to pay for its cleanup, which would include a plan to deal with 
the dangerous chemicals that have seeped into the shallow aquifer below 
the site.

...

The largest 23 users, however, are being held responsible for the actual 
cleanup cost, which they can also choose to contract themselves. These 
are the customers responsible for a half of a percent or more of the 
contamination.

That list includes Wal-Mart, Firestone and BFI Waste Systems. The 
biggest, by far, is the Defense Reutilization Marketing Service, which 
disposed of property for the military. The department is being held 
responsible for nearly 24 percent of the contamination, almost four 
times the amount of second-place S&J Petroleum.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/environment/stories/MYSA070306.1A.superfund.197833b.html

--
Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org

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