My Christmas became a disaster this year. On the 23rd of this month, at 4 in the morning, when I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I smelled fuel oil in my upstairs hall. This is
not a good thing to discover at that hour of the morning.
The furnace in my house burns a type of oil which is the same thing as diesel fuel (the kind of thing on which big trucks run). It is contained in a large tank outside of my house and is sucked into the furnace through a small diameter pipe which is inserted through my basement wall. That tank is/was many years old and, probably, should have been replaced with a new one a few years ago, but when one doesn't have the money to spend on a new fuel oil tank, one doesn't replace it, LOL.
The damn tank sprang a leak in the middle of the night and part of the fuel seeped into my basement through an old coal bin, outside my house and attached to my basement wall. This coal bin was covered over by my back porch. Decades ago the coal bin was partially filled in with dirt. The bin is 8 feet long by 4 feet wide by 6 feet deep. It has a cement floor with all four sides made up of cement building blocks. The dirt in the bin took up two-thirds of the area. All that dirt was saturated with fuel oil and stunk to high hell! In addition the dirt all around the tank was contaminated with fuel oil.
At 4 a.m. the smell wasn't all that bad and there was not a whole lot I could do about the situation, then, so I went back to bed and tried to go back to sleep. That didn't work, lol. At 7 a.m I got up and went down to the basement to assess whatever damage there might be down there. Ugh. There were two streams of fuel oil draining across my basement floor next to the furnace and exiting down the floor drain next to the furnace. I knew this was not good but there was no way to redirect it and there was no way to stop the oil from leaking. It's not like you can put a giant bandage on a leaking fuel oil tank, LOL.
At 8 a.m. I called my cousin who farms my land and asked him what I should do. He came down to my house and I told him the situation and he asked me to where that floor drain emptied. I told him the roadside ditch. He made a strange face and said he was going to check the ditch stream for signs of fuel oil. He came back shortly and told me we had a huge mess in the ditch with fuel oil covering the water in the ditch stream. He called some guy he knew in the county government. This man called the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and the local fire department. The fire department showed up quickly with two trucks and the fire chief's car. They came inside my house and started running fume assessment checks to determine the potential for explosion. Basically, all that was "busy work",lol, because fuel oil fumes aren't explosive, at all, the way propane or gasoline are. I don't know if the fireman guy didn't know that or if he thought I didn't know that. My cats were totally freaked with four fireman, in all their gear, walking around in my house and down in my basement; I was a little freaked, myself.
The level of fumes were fairly bad and the fire chief said he wouldn't allow me to stay in the house overnight.
He ordered me to leave. I told him I wasn't going anywhere at that moment and that he didn't have any jurisdiction to make me---and he didn't have any legal grounds to stand on, there, and he knew that and backed off with his insistance. However I did end up staying with friends for four days.
What ensued next was a vertible nightmare which spanned two days. With the contaminated drainage ditch stream the EPA guy ordered a massive environmental cleanup to begin. This involved sopping up all the fuel oil in the ditch stream with the use of specially designed absorbant pads which where applied to the top of the water's surface to sop up the fuel floating on it. This was carried out by a special company which provides this kind of service in these situations. Just prior to this, they dammed up the ditch stream by constructing an earthen dam at the far end of it. My cousin assisted their efforts by placing bales of straw into the ditch stream so as to absorb some of the oil before the dam was finished. This dam has flow pipes which lay a top it and extend down into the wated below the level of the oil so that the water can continue to flow down the ditch but the oil remains contained in that part of the ditch behind the dam. It is a very clever construction and works very well.
Once they had the dam created, with the help of my cousin and his backhoe tractor, the special recovery team turned their attention to my basement and the contaminated ground around the outside of my house. To access the coal bin they removed the porch floor with a chain saw and removed one of the porch support posts, leaving a single post to hold up the porch roof.
To further access the coal bin, they needed to move the still leaking fuel oil tank. I placed a call to my furnace technician who had the necessary equipment to both pump out the fuel and the transfer tank to contain it. The furnace guy showed up and did what needed to be done. He cut up the old tank in preparation to hauling it away. He'd also brought a new tank with him to replace the old one. He set it out of the way to be set into position, later.
With the old tank out of the way, the crew brought their mini-excavator tractor up to the side of the, now, exposed coal bin and started digging into the dirt and removing it, dumping the contents into the wide bucket attached to the front of my cousin's backhoe tractor. He ferried this contaminated dirt to a spot at the front of my garage where the recovery team had laid down a enormous sheet of heavy plastic on the ground. On to this, my cousin dumped the contaminated dirt as it was removed from the coal bin. This went on for about four and a half hours. Meanwhile, other members of the crew were in my basement shoveling out contaminated debris from the basement floor. Then they sprinkled a deep layer of absorbent pellets on the floor to soak up the remaining oil. (The pellets resembled kitty litter, in a way, LOL....glad the cats didn't get into the basement or they would have "used" it, LOL) Nearly a half a dump truck load of contaminated dirt was removed from that coal bin. The stuff really stunk. Before the team left for the day they rigged up an industrial fan with an exhaust tube through the large gap in my basement wall, which had been the door to the coal bin. This fan exhausted fumes all night long. However, it all still smelled horrible the following morning.
The next day the team came back at 8 a.m., sharp. I'd been back to the house since around 6:30 a.m. (Didn't get much sleep that night at my friends' house....can't imagine why
) The team spilt in two sections. One worked at the house, the other worked in the ditch stream. The 'house team' worked, first, to scrape up all the absorbant litter in the basement and bag it up and haul those bags out to the growing pile of contaminated stuff by my garage. The ditch team removed the absorbant pads which they had laid down the previous day and replaced them with fresh pads. The used pads were placed in huge plastic bags and hauled to the contaminated pile and place on top of it. While the house team worked in the basement, the crew chief began working on the contaminated soil around the cement pad which had held the fuel oil tank. Over the next several hours he scraped up and removed 20 inches of dirt. All in all, over 9 tons of contaminated dirt was removed; that's slighly more than a dump truck load! I asked the guy how he knew he'd gotten all the contaminated material. Getting out of the mini-backhoe he bent down, grabbed a handful of soil, smelled it, and handed it to me to smell. He said that when he can't smell fuel oil, he knows he's finished. Makes sense, LOL.
With all the stuff that went on to create this environmental nightmare, there were other snags and stuff which went wrong, lol. One of those involved the electrical grounding rod for the electric system of my house. When the crew chief was scraping away contaminated dirt against the side of my house's foundation, the "teeth" on the lip of his backhoe snagged the grounding wire to the electric box and gave it a yank. Sparks and a popping sound were the result.
The guy got off his backhoe and, wearing heavy gloves, tried to guide the badly bent wire back toward the wall of the house, only to create a blue flash of light and louder popping sounds and lots of sparks. I ended up called the electric company which sent out a repairman who informed me that it was not the electric company's job to repair anything to do with the grounding wire or its rod!
He said I needed an electrician. So....I called an electrician. Now, you need to understand that this was Christmas Eve! and I didn't know how quickly an electrican could get there. I got lucky in that the company I called had the owner on call for the holiday. The guy got there in less than an hour, assessed the situation, explaining that the grounding wire had been detached from the buss bar inside one of the electric boxes. The guy decomissioned the electric service, fixed the problem, putting everything back together and reconnected the electricity. Phew! we were back in business and my power was on again.
At that point the crew chief picked up where he'd left off. When all the contaminated soil was removed, my cousin and his backhoe tractor began to haul fresh dirt from elsewhere on my farm to the site and dump it on the spot where the contaminated dirt was removed. The crew chief used his mini-backhoe to move the fresh dirt into position and tamp in down. Once the new dirt was in place they repositioned the new fuel oil tank back on its cement pad. They placed sturdy temporary plasitic fencing around the hole which used to be my back porch. In addition they cleaned up all the mess they'd made and left about 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve.
The EPA guy made all kinds of veiled threats about what this clean-up and recovery would cost me, suggesting it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It came to nowhere near that much, thank God. However, with the crew gone my house still smelled to high hell and wasn't livable. Some very dear friends insisted I stay at their house and I spent Christmas with them and their adult son. It was certainly better than a hotel room, somewhere. Each day I came back to the house, fed my many cats, and worked to clean up the mess in the basement in an attempt to get rid of the stink. The issue is that the fuel oil has partially seeped into the concrete floor in my basement and getting it out is next to impossible. The furnace guy returned this past Saturday and hooked up the fuel line to the new tank so the house has heat, again. The stink grew less noticable and continues to do so. On Sunday I was able to move back into the house. The smell is still here, to some degree, worse in certain parts of the house at different times of the day but it is livable, where before it wasn't. The cats are all fine and the fuel oil smell doesn't seem to have affected them.
To those of you who may have wondered where I disappeared to over the Christmas days---this is what I've been dealing with, LOL, and why I didn't have the time to be here, but I'm back, LOL. Hopefully, the odor will continue to diminsh as my basement floor continues to dry out and I won't need to vacate the premises again any time soon.
Mary C.
when you have Christmas with one part of the family on one day, and then another celebration day with another section of the family and, finally, the real Christmas Day with your spouse and children, LOL. It's so nice when you aren't the person doing all the cooking, LOL. Unfortunately, most of the time, I got stuck with the cooking. 
