Our home inspectors do inspections in the following areas: Baie D'Urfe, Beaconsfield, Chateauguay, Cote St-Luc, Dollard des Ormeaux, Dorion, Dorval, Eastern Ontario, Hampstead, Hudson, Ile Bizard, Kirkland, Lasalle, Laval, Montreal West, Montréal, Notre Dame de Grâce, Notre Dame de l'Ile Perrot, Outremont, Pierrefonds, Pointe Claire, Quebec, Roxboro, Senneville, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, St-Lazare, Vallyfield, Vaudreuil, Verdun, Ville St Laurent, Westmount.
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| JULY 2010 THE MOSE REPORT |
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When Oil Spoils Your Soil
For months now we have watched the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill threaten wildlife in the water and on nearby beaches. From our perspective here in Montreal, it seems very far away. We shake our heads and take grim solace that at least it isn’t happening in our own backyards.
Or isn’t it? Don’t laugh; if your home uses heating oil to keep warm in winter, you could face a huge and expensive clean-up operation if ever your oil tank springs a leak.
Oil tanks may be sturdy steel containers, but like all things they aren’t good forever. Within 25 to 30 years, they tend to rust around the bottom as a result of condensation forming where residual water sinks within the oil inside the tank (water being naturally heavier than heating oil). And while most homes have their tanks installed either in the garage or basement, where a leak can be detected and dealt with before too much damage is done, the same can’t be said when the tank was installed beneath the ground.
This is a practice that was quite common in certain areas of Montreal for homes constructed after the 1920s, when heating with oil came into fashion. But by the mid 1960s, it had become clear there were serious problems that came with burying the tanks in the earth, so the practice fell out of favour. Since a ruptured oil tank isn’t easily detected when it is underground, the risk of soil contamination with buried tanks is severe.
This has convinced some jurisdictions to pass targeted legislation controlling how these tanks are removed - sometimes banning them outright. In New York State, contractors have been prohibited from installing them underground for over 10 years, and any inspectors who find them are required to report their whereabouts to the EPA (the United States’ Environmental Protection Agency). Here in Quebec, thorough soil decontamination is required whenever an oil tank is dug up.
Costly if left unchecked
While the trend in this province is moving away from heating oil and towards cheaper alternatives, such as hydro-electricity or natural gas, homes built during the era when buried oil tanks were fashionable still pose a serious financial risk to their owners.
For example, a homeowner in Westmount, Quebec recently had to remove an old rusted-out tank that had so soiled the earth, the total cost of decontamination came to some $300,000! While that is an extreme case, you should budget at least $5,000 for removal. From there, the cost goes up with the amount of soil needing decontamination.
So if you do have a buried oil tank, you might as well resign yourself to getting it removed (and the sooner the better), since it is an accident waiting to happen, if it hasn’t already. If you haven’t noticed any otherwise unexplainable increase in your oil consumption in recent years, that can be a sign the tank is still holding up, but you’re just marking time before the inevitable.
Inspection of the surrounding earth
Companies such as D&G Enviro-Groupe can perform on-the-spot inspections to determine if the surrounding soil needs decontamination from any oil or other harmful substances that may have leached out.
And what do you do with your discarded clunker? As the saying goes: one person’s trash is another’s treasure. Artist Cal Lane in upstate New York has carved out her niche (quite literally) by re-purposing discarded oil tanks with her blowtorch and unique vision. Who would have thought a rusty old oil tank could become a beautifully ornate work of art?
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Canadian house prices are rich no matter how one looks at it, but they are likely to become richer yet before material risks emerge later next year and beyond.
-- unnamed economists at Scotia Capital, as reported by the Globe and Mail (July 19, 2010)
[Ivan Mose note: Does anybody know what these guys are talking about?]
A stitch in time saves nine
-- author unknown
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MOSE HOME INSPECTION SERVICES
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Pre-Purchase, Pre-listing, Expertise, Residential, Commercial, Industrial. Environmental assessment. Inspections in English or French.
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