Behind just about every environmental program in the United States is an environmental disaster that brought it into being, and leaking gas stations are no exception. In this case, the disaster became public in December 1983, when a 60 Minutes segment warned Americans that underground storage tanks were a “time bomb” in their neighborhoods. The show documented the daily struggles of families in a small Rhode Island town whose drinking water had long been contaminated by Mobil and Exxon stations uphill. With 2 or 3 of every 10 gas stations in the country leaking, the show’s host, Harry Reasoner, told viewers that it promised to be the pollution disaster of the 1980s.
The catastrophe was set in motion in the years after World War II, when many Americans bought cars and moved to the suburbs, spurring demand for gasoline. Oil companies helped build hundreds of thousands of gas stations around the country and installed steel storage tanks beneath them. But those steel tanks and piping, exposed to soil, corroded over time, and petroleum began seeping through cracks and holes, carrying carcinogens into the groundwater.
The petroleum industry knew the risks. In 1961, advertisements in the trade magazine National Petroleum News acknowledged that “rusty, leaky storage tanks” were a problem. The pipes that connected tanks to the pumps were prone to breaking, too. In 1962, a B.F. Goodrich ad touting flexible connectors warned that “the settling or shifting of underground storage tanks can cause pipelines to crack, leak, and break apart.”
Within a few years, safer fiberglass tanks emerged as a substitute, though the steel industry later argued that the fiberglass couldn’t handle the alcohol-blended fuels that were being used. Manufacturers started offering leak detectors, promising that the technology could help stave off lawsuits and bad press. “With Red Jacket Leak Detectors, you’ll probably never have to reckon with contamination from piping leak losses … litigation and bad publicity … unhappy dealers … or even disaster,” read an advertisement in 1972.
By the early 1970s, oil companies were well aware that the tanks they owned beneath gas stations posed a huge liability. “Large sums of money, time, and effort are exhausted on a continuing basis in the location and detection of leaking tanks and lines,” a report from Exxon said in 1973.
The realization came at a time when public concern over pollution was taking off. In 1969, floating debris caught fire in Ohio’s Cuyahoga River, sending flames five stories high, and a drilling accident near Santa Barbara, California, spread an oil slick over more than 800 square miles of the Pacific Ocean. The modern environmental movement was born a year later, when some 20 million Americans demonstrated on the first Earth Day in April 1970. The protests led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and a slew of regulations to protect the air and water.