Like the central Illinois towns of Shelbyville, Decatur and Springfield, the Metro East village of Hartford is home to a man-made lake. With estimates as large as 4 million gallons, the Hartford lake would be roughly one-fourth as large as the reservoir that provides recreation and drinking water to the state capital. But, unlike Lake Springfield, the Hartford lake is underground — and made of gasoline, not water.
The heavy spring rains that replenish most lakes have a different effect in Hartford. They stir the underground water table and the accompanying layer of spilled petroleum products that rests above, sending noxious vapors up into basements and crawl spaces.
Since the late 1960s, the pheno-menon has been blamed for about a dozen house fires, many more home evacuations and countless cases of headaches, rashes and other minor health problems. But after several unsuccessful attempts, it appears state and federal officials are committed to cleaning the lake of hydrocarbons.
Hartford, a village of 1,500, was home to oil refineries long before it came to host a lake of gas. The first refinery opened in 1908. And at one time, as many as three gasoline- producing plants provided jobs to the Madison County community. Two of the refineries have been closed for more than a decade. The third has changed ownership. But when the old oil companies left town, they left behind a collection of spilled petroleum products that rests under most of north Hartford.
“I remember news stories where people were actually able to light and set fire to their dirt, that’s how bad this was,” says William Mudge. Last summer, Mudge, the Madison County state’s attorney, joined Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan in a lawsuit against two of the oil companies that once operated in Hartford.
The suit certainly was not the first time the state stepped in. But past efforts failed to remedy the problem. The noxious vapors and the house fires subsided after the companies installed systems to extract some
of the subterranean pollution. But a few years later, the problems flared up again.
Only now, with the help of the federal government, does it appear that Hartford residents might eventually live free of fumes. But, even while state and federal officials worked to clean up contamination in Hartford, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency issued a permit allowing a new company to reopen a portion of the refinery deemed responsible for much of the pollution.
With estimates as large as 4 million gallons, the Hartford lake would be roughly one-fourth as large as the reservoir that provides recreation and drinking water to the state capital.
ConocoPhillips owns the Wood River refinery in Roxana, the last of three refineries to operate in the Hartford area. In 2002, ConocoPhillips bought part of the Premcor refinery in Hartford. This April, with a problem at the Wood River site threatening to lower the company’s gasoline output, ConocoPhillips sought permission to reopen part of the Premcor site and connect the facilities. At the time, the state’s gasoline pump prices were at their highest since September 2001. So, with no mention of Hartford’s environmental plight, Gov. Rod Blagojevich approved a temporary permit, capitalizing on a public relations opportunity.
“The bottom line is that gasoline shortages mean increased gasoline prices,” Gov. Rod Blagojevich said at the time. “We recognize the serious impact ConocoPhillips’ operating problems could have on gasoline consumers in some of our state’s highest-priced gasoline markets.”
Despite the hyperbole, Blagojevich’s action was short-lived and did little to stem higher pump prices. The Illinois EPA issued its own superseding final permit a week later. And as the plant resumed production, gas prices soared in the ensuing weeks, hitting a state average of $2.07 in mid-May or 25 cents higher than when Blagojevich ordered the temporary permit. But why would the state allow a refinery largely responsible for a lake of gasoline to reopen?
“The contamination occurred, of course, under Premcor ownership and not ConocoPhillips. We are treating those as separate issues,” says Kim Kuntzman, spokeswoman for the Illinois EPA Bureau of Air. In the state’s opinion, responsibility for the existing ground pollution did not transfer along with refinery ownership.
The permit was for the air pollution that would accompany reopening the facility. Officials in the Illinois EPA Bureau of Land are the ones who deal with the pollution underneath Hartford. But it’s easy to understand how residents could see the two as intertwined. Back in March, before Blagojevich intervened, the Illinois EPA held a public hearing on the air permit. The meeting had to be moved to the local grade school after gas vapors — a land issue — made the Hartford Recreation Center unsafe.
Over the past 40 years, those same fumes have made homes in Hartford uninhabitable from time to time. Residents also claim they have endured more lasting negative effects on their health and property values. At least two citizen lawsuits have been filed against Premcor and several other companies that own or have owned refineries or underground pipelines in the area.
While those citizens seek their own legal redress, the state has handed the reins to the U.S. EPA, which has begun flexing its enforcement muscle. Although considered a last resort, the federal agency has access to an oil pollution fund generally only tapped for U.S. Coast Guard cleanups. If polluters can’t be prodded into action on their own, the U.S. EPA can begin cleanup itself and then send the offenders a bill. It’s similar to the way in which the federal government uses Superfund to remediate hazardous waste sites.
“Things just tend to move along more quickly when there are legally required deadlines,” says Maggie Carson, spokeswoman for the Illinois EPA’s Bureau of Land.
In March, Premcor, Atlantic Richfield Co. and Shell Oil Products US signed a U.S. EPA agreement to address the vapor problems and design a permanent cleanup plan for the pool of petroleum products under Hartford.
“To be honest, it might take 20 or 30 years to pump this stuff out,” says Mike Joyce, spokesman for the U.S. EPA in Chicago. “We wish it was in a pool or a cavern or something, but it’s not. It’s sort of like in the sandy material. It’s like trying to pump stuff out of a sponge almost. So it’s not as easy as it sounds and it takes a long time.”
In 1978, after 76 gas odor complaints and five separate vapor-fed fires, Clark Oil — then the owner of a Hartford refinery and underground pipelines — installed wells to pump out the contamination under Hartford.
The next spate of complaints surfaced in 1990, when an exceedingly wet spring preceded by two dry years brought strong odors and several fires. By then, the Clark wells had recovered nearly 1.2 million gallons of petroleum remnants from underneath Hartford.
But an extensive Illinois EPA report that year concluded that 900,000 to 3.8 million gallons remained. After that, Clark Oil installed a vapor recovery system connected to a dozen boreholes across north Hartford in the hopes of catching the vapors before they entered homes.
It was another decade before the vapors again captured state attention. In 2002, after complaints of nausea and chronic headaches, the Illinois EPA and the state Department of Public Health began compiling air quality samples.
The following summer the Illinois attorney general’s office and then the U.S. EPA got involved. Under the federal agreement, Premcor, Shell and Atlantic Richfield are currently purchasing the parts to install a new, more efficient vapor recovery system. They also agreed to purchase individual home recovery kits — essentially a fan-drawn, basement-to-roof piping system — for any north Hartford resident who wants one. And the companies will begin reimbursing the town’s volunteer fire department for vapor-related calls.
Joyce, the U.S. EPA spokesman for the project, says those considerations were the result of recent public hearings. And he hopes another such “open house” scheduled for July 8 will continue to assuage community concerns. The trio of oil companies currently is conducting an extensive study of the underground contamination, the results of which are expected this fall. They then have until late December to present a plan to remove the contamination.
That schedule would seem to ease at last some concerns in Hartford. But the community has lived with the effects of the underground contamination for four decades. And what seemed like solutions in 1978 and again in 1990 were simply not sufficient. That makes it easy to understand why citizens, and even local officials, have guarded optimism. So says Mara McGinnis, community relations coordinator for the Illinois EPA.
“Their response has been measured. Let’s put it that way. They recognize that, to this point, we’ve gotten a lot further than anyone’s gotten in the past and they are cautiously optimistic, I guess, about us continuing at this kind of pace and this schedule,” she says. “Nobody wants to come out of this with egg on their face, so they’re being fairly cautious about what they say in the press, but they have expressed to us that they’re really happy to see the progress.”
Progress may not prompt immediate peace of mind. But, for the people of Hartford, drying up one of Illinois’ most dubious man-made lakes would mean a lot fewer headaches.
Pat Guinane can be reached at capitolbureau@aol.com.
Illinois Issues, July/August 2004
