As you no doubt know, removing the tank and then testing is by far the easiest approach. In my area, if there is no evidence of oil in the soil immediately under the tank, no further testing is done. A leak would produce contamination in that soil. The test consists of feeling and smelling of the soil as soon as the tank is removed and before the hole is filled. If contamination is discovered, things take a different turn with respect to testing. Good luck.

Make sure you ask for court and attorney costs in the settlement, if you can do that in NY.

Track every cost you have related to this case, including mileage to and from your attorney, mileage to and from people from whom you will get estimates to repair your yard, phone calls (especially long distance calls). All those little things can add up to hundreds of dollars. Ask for all these costs to be reimbursed to you if you can.

I've been lurking on this one for quite a while but never posted. Sounds like the whole thing should go over to the Home Disasters forum ; )

Good luck with your court case and let us know how it turns out!

While we're battling with the Nassau County DOH, which wants to grant all kinds of waivers to the neighbor to abandon his tank on our property, and without proper testing, and while our attorney is busy drawing up he paperwork to haul the neighbor into court, I would like to ask if anyone knows of an independent water testing lab in Nassau County. After reading about MTBE, and questioning whether there are any other chemicals from gasoline which could have invaded the ground water and drinking water, we have decided that it might not hurt to test the water while we cool our heels. BTW, point of interest. I called two tank companies which told me that they have never heard of the DOH allowing the burial of a tank over 1080 gallons (both asked me who this guy knows) and both said that it was our interests at stake here and that whatever we decided to do, we should use someone who is working for us, and not for the neighbor. Of course, both decided that since they work with the Nassau County DOH ALL the time, and were going to call them to find out why they were allowing this, I thought I might get some interesting answers. BOTH have disappeared - never called back and they don't answer my calls. Think there's some interesting stuff going on here?? I have two more to call, and this time I don't think I wil even mention the issues here. As for price, there's about a $1500 difference between abandonment and removal.

MTBE has never, to my knowledge, been used in heating oil. Testing the groundwater may prove to be far more expensive than you now imagine. Drilling for access to the groundwater could run into multiple thousands of dollars. And where will that big machinery get access to your property? My earlier suggestions are much simpler and lower cost.

LeslieW:
If what you say is true.

"As for price, there's about a $1500 difference between abandonment and removal."

The why don't you suggest that you will pay the differntial ($1500) to remove it with the caveat that any unforeseen remedial action (also read contamination that needs to be taken care of) is the responsibility of your neighbor.

I suspect that you will surely spend $1500 in legal expense, and if there is truly no problem, as the DOH and your neighbor are asserting, then he has additional no risk associated with this arrangement.

my outsider 0.02

good luck

Bus Driver, I wasn't talking about testing the groundwater, but rather the tap water in the house. sdello, we would be more than happy to pay the difference, but the guy refuses to have it removed. I think he feels that there will be so much damage, and therefore, so much repair, he will not want to pay for the restoration of the property. The tank guy who has disappeared on me said that there is no way I could even imagine the mounds of soil which need to be dug up, and that there would have to be a place to pile it. He also said that working in the area with an excavator would cause immense damage. He then said that perhaps there wasn't enough room to work in order to remove it. I'm sure this is the kind of thing the neighbor has already been told, which is why he wants to simply have it abandoned.

I called two tank companies this morning and am scheduling appointments with them to take a look at the property and let me know what realistically cn be done in terms of removal. It may be possible that it CAN'T be removed without major problems.

First, MTBE is not a component of heating oil, it is an additive to gasoline only. All fuel products will have some chemicals in common as they are separated via fractionation of the same material. Gasoline contains mostly the lighter ends of the fuel fraction below propanes, butanes etc., diesel is the next grade down and fuel oils, then parafins below that (i'm leaving out a lot of the smaller groups). Addition of chemicals such as MTBE are made after the fractionating process.
If you receive your water from a water district (i.e. city water) with a common well or reservoir, it would be a waste of money to test your drinking water. If you are simply concerned about your drinking water, the authority that supplies your water must make available to you any data determined during their regular testing. Many water authorities now have this information available on the internet (not all).

TANK IS OUT!!!! After three days of digging and vacuuming up soil, they finally uncovered the behemoth buried on my property. Thing had to be least least fifteen feet long and five feet wide. They cut it up and hauled it away, and took some soil samples. Next step is to backfill. Everything looked pretty good down there - no evidence of any leakage at all.

glad to hear it.

Thank goodness! You must be relieved.

Damn! I'm going to truly miss being updated about this. I hope for your sake this is the end of it and there is no more attorneys involved. They have bigger wallets than the mafia.