Your local tank

     

    Hello there! Wander here from Wander without Being Lost; again Ben has graciously opened his doors to me and after the charged story he opened with earlier today I thought I would go another direction. this post is a slight spin off/reason for a poem on my site...and being the free plug whore that I am here is a link to that poem.

    About a month ago I was driving on highway 30 in Portland on my way to Sauvie Island and I drove past an abandoned gas station, then another. I remember thinking at the time “what a waste”, the building appeared to be in good working order, and the location was great for a station.

 It got me to thinking about how many abandoned gas stations there are all over Portland…then the thought expanded to the whole country. How many derelict gas stations are there in our country, and why?

    Now being the extremely busy person (and at times lazy) I haven’t had time to do an exhaustive search of every database; what I did do was to ask the Google!  Now the Google being all knowing and also all seeing told me to look at an article from the Herald Tribune. In this article the author claims that there are over fifty thousand abandoned gas stations in our country…if that number is to be believed that would mean that there are enough for every state in this country to have a thousand. Can you imagine that? One thousand empty fill stations in Wyoming, or Utah, Florida, Washington, Ohio and even Rhode Island. 

    Another article the google told me to look at was from the Pierce County Business Examiner, this article made claims that there were in upwards of two hundred thousand of these sites, and the norm for a clean up, just of the tanks and any contaminated soil, would be thirty to fifty thousand dollars.  That is just a shit load of money…three to five billion dollars on the low side.

    I am going to stop here. What I would like to have happen would be for you to do some research of your own…fill in the other blanks…what other costs are there, and why the hell don’t we completely transition to something safer, and cleaner, like hydrogen!

Wander

Images found on bing image...key words: abandoned gas stations, and old gas pumps