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Westchester County may require overfill monitors on oil tanks
THE JOURNAL NEWS
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If you want to avoid messy spills, it would help if your oil tank could whistle.
The noise comes from a "vent alarm" that sounds as incoming oil from a delivery displaces air in the tank. When the whistling stops, it signals the tank is close to full.
Not every home heating oil tank has the device. But Westchester County officials think every tank should.
So county lawmakers are considering a bill, submitted by County Executive Andrew Spano, that would require thousands of homeowners to install the monitors on their tanks within two years.
The cost of a basic device, which can be as little as $22, would be borne by the property owner. Oil companies would have to notify customers of the new requirement and install the whistles free.
On tanks lacking a whistle, the delivery person must listen to the gurgling sound of oil filling the tank to determine when it is nearing capacity, Ron Gatto, director of environmental security for Westchester County police, told lawmakers last week. In many cases, Gatto said, the "fill by ear" method fails and the tank overfills, pushing oil out the vent pipe.
The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation estimates that this results in 700 to 800 oil spills a year in Westchester, Gatto said. In some cases, spills can seep into groundwater and cause further environmental damage. Gatto said many states already require residential tanks to have such monitors, and most new tanks in the region do. But he said New York had never mandated that old tanks below a certain size be retrofitted with the devices.
The law would apply to tanks that hold 250 to 1,100 gallons of oil — generally the size used by homes and some small businesses. Homeowners who fail to comply would face a warning first, then fines of $250 to $500.
According to the county, property owners are largely responsible for spillage cleanup costs. But Ralph Castaldo, president of the Westchester-Putnam Fuel Dealers Association, said such cases often become messy disputes over who must pay.
Castaldo, a manager at Robison Oil in Elmsford, said his association supported a requirement that all fuel tanks have the overfill monitors. Newer oil delivery trucks can pump up to 65 gallons a minute, he said, giving a driver listening for the sound of a full tank only a short amount of time to react before a disaster hits.
Castaldo took the idea to the county but had not seen the draft proposal put before lawmakers. He said his members might have concerns about the requirement that they install the monitors at no cost in all cases. He said while most installations were routine, some, such as putting one on a tank in a crawl space, could take more time.
"To say just blankly (to do everything) free, that's very unfair," he said.
Leni Glauber knows first hand how messy some oil spills can be. A decade ago, she said, an oil company made an unwanted delivery to her White Plains home while her furnace was under repair. Tens of gallons of oil spilled out into the basement and sent fumes through the house; her family was only able to return three months later after an expensive cleanup job. Ultimately, she said, the oil company agreed to pay most of the cleanup costs in a legal settlement, but only after years of fighting it.
Glauber said any homeowner would want to avoid a spill, but is sure the tank at the house does not have an overfill monitor now.
"It sounds like a good idea," she said.
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