What are leaking underground storage tanks and how are they being cleaned up?

For more than a decade, some residents of the tiny Richmond, Rhode Island, neighborhood of Canob Park drank and bathed using tap water that had been tainted by gasoline that leaked from storage tanks buried under service stations a few hundred yards from their homes. They spent years battling oil companies, dealing with the daily misery of boiling most of their water and wondering about lasting damage to themselves and their children.

The Canob Park disaster sparked a national outcry in the 1980s to clean up and regulate the thousands of underground tanks storing petroleum, heating oil and other hazardous chemicals across the United States. It’s a program that continues today, where the tanks are a leading cause of groundwater pollution even after more than a half-million sites have been cleaned up.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is a collaboration between The Associated Press and The Uproot Project.

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Nearly half of Americans depend on groundwater for their drinking water, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and it’s not just well water that is threatened. A city’s water supply, while treated and processed to make sure it meets federal standards, may still collect contaminants from gas leaks on its way to the tap. In some cases, this can happen when the water originates from an unregulated well — some cities get their drinking water from a mix of surface and groundwater — or through cracked pipes.

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