Your Community Is in a Monitoring Desert

There are over 740,000 underground storage tank facilities across America. 80% of them are in counties with zero benzene air monitors. When these tanks leak, nobody is measuring what reaches the air your family breathes.

The government has known since 1984 that leaking tanks contaminate drinking water. Congress chose to immunize the manufacturers and socialize the cleanup cost. This site follows the scarlet thread — from the 1979 hearings to the tanks still leaking in your county today — and gives you the tool to do something about it.

Check Your Area Now

Harris v. United States, S.D. Ala. No. 1:26-cv-00184 — Provenance-audited data

The Scarlet Trail: How We Got Here

In 1984, Congress learned that America had roughly 1.4 million underground gasoline storage tanks. A Congressional Research Service study found that 85% of them were bare steel with no corrosion protection. Senator Lautenberg told his colleagues that 75,000 to 100,000 were already leaking, and that 350,000 more were expected to leak within five years.

1.4M
Gasoline tanks nationwide (1984)
CRS study via EPA 510-R-04-001
85%
Unprotected bare steel
CRS study via EPA 510-R-04-001
75K-100K
Already leaking (1984)
130 Cong. Rec. S13822-23
350K
Expected to leak within 5 years
130 Cong. Rec. S13822-23

Congress responded with the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments of 1984 (HSWA), which created Subtitle I of the Solid Waste Disposal Act. The law set performance standards for new tanks, but it imposed no liability on the manufacturers who built the 1.19 million failing tanks already in the ground. Liability fell only on owners and operators.

The structural problem: Manufacturers built tanks they knew would corrode. Congress let them walk away. The cleanup bill was socialized, paid by a 0.1 cent per gallon tax on motor fuels into the LUST Trust Fund, and by state funds like Alabama's Tank Trust Fund (ATTF), which is funded by tank registration fees. That is your money.

The Timeline

1984
Congress passes HSWA Subtitle I. Standards for new tanks only. No manufacturer liability for the 1.19M existing tanks. Owner/operator liability established under section 9003(h).
1986
SARA creates the LUST Trust Fund (26 U.S.C. 9508). Funded by 0.1 cent per gallon tax on motor fuels, a consumer-paid tax, not a manufacturer-paid tax.
1998
EPA upgrade deadline arrives. Existing tanks must have corrosion protection and spill/overfill devices. But 40 CFR 280.71 allows closure in place, tanks can be filled with inert material and left in the ground.
2026
Today: 740,033 UST facilities, 196,874 still open. 529,175 confirmed LUST releases, 69,585 still open. 80.7% of all UST facilities are in counties with zero benzene air monitors.

The Monitoring Desert

When a tank leaks, benzene and other volatile organic compounds (VOCs) can migrate through soil gas into indoor air, a process called vapor intrusion. But if there is no air monitor in your county, there is no data. And if there is no data, there is no evidence of harm. And if there is no evidence of harm, there is no basis for action.

3,029
of 3,144 counties have zero benzene monitors
96.3% of U.S. counties
80.7%
of UST facilities in benzene deserts
597,148 of 740,033 facilities
69.1%
of U.S. population in benzene deserts
231M of 335M people
36.4%
Minority population in desert areas
vs. national average
The subrogation gap: In other states (Montana, Iowa, Vermont, Indiana, California), state tank funds paid for cleanups, then sued the insurers to recover the money (subrogation). There are 22 documented court cases. But in Alabama, the ATTF has not pursued subrogation against insurers. The crossmatch of 81 Mobile County ADEM incident files found zero overlap with any insurer recovery case.

The Petition Mechanism

Here is the hook: most state environmental statutes give citizens the right to petition for investigation or enforcement. In Alabama, Ala. Code 36-12-40 gives every citizen the right to inspect public records. The ATTF statute (Ala. Code ch. 22-35) requires annual audits and public reporting. And the state's subrogation rights, the right to recover from insurers who should have paid, may be going unenforced.

When a citizen petitions the Attorney General or the state auditor to investigate whether the tank fund is properly pursuing subrogation recoveries, it creates a record. It creates a hook. It forces the question: why is Alabama's fund not recovering from insurers the way other states do?

File a Citizen Petition

Filing a petition is simpler than you might think. You do not need a lawyer. You need to state who you are, what you are asking for, and what records you want examined. The template below auto-fills with your area's data when you search above.

What a petition does: It creates a formal record requesting investigation. Even if the AG does not act immediately, the petition establishes that a citizen asked and that the state was on notice. Multiple petitions from multiple citizens across multiple counties build a pattern that becomes harder to ignore.

How to File

  1. Search your area above to get your local data
  2. Click Generate Petition and the template fills in your numbers
  3. Review and print the petition
  4. Mail or deliver to your state Attorney General and state auditor
  5. Keep a copy with your certified mail receipt
(Search your area first to auto-fill local data)

The Evidence: Data You Can Verify

Every number on this site is traceable to a primary source. Here are the key datasets and where they come from.

National Tank and Leak Data

740,033
Total UST facilities
county_monitoring_desert_table.csv
196,874
Open UST facilities
county_monitoring_desert_table.csv
529,175
Total LUST releases
county_monitoring_desert_table.csv
69,585
Open LUST releases
county_monitoring_desert_table.csv

State Fund Payouts

$20.7B
Per-state latest-year sum
state_fund_by_state_year.csv
$18.8B
ASTSWMO 2025 national total
ASTSWMO 2025 Annual Tanks Survey
$880M
Alabama ATTF cumulative
ASTSWMO 2025
70,203
Alabama ATTF claims
ASTSWMO 2025

Vapor Intrusion Data Gaps (MNA Sites)

At 51 Alabama sites being remediated by Monitored Natural Attenuation (MNA), the following vapor intrusion data was not located in the document files:

Important caveat: The source CSV states this data was "not located in OUR COPY of N of NNN documents." Absence in the partial file holdings does NOT prove the data was never collected by ADEM. It may exist in files we do not have. This is an absence finding, not a non-existence finding.
96%
Sub-slab not found (49 of 51)
98%
Indoor air not found (50 of 51)
90%
Vapor surveys not found (46 of 51)
57%
Soil gas not found (29 of 51)

Alabama: Zero Benzene Monitors

All 67 Alabama counties have zero active benzene air monitors. For VOC monitors, 66 of 67 counties have none. Only Jefferson County (Birmingham) has 2 VOC monitors. The Mobile corridor's nearest benzene monitor is in Dutchtown, Louisiana, 277 to 285 kilometers away.

View Alabama ATTF Site-Level Data (189 records)

Subrogation: The Legal Precedent

When a state tank fund pays for a cleanup, it typically has the right to step into the shoes of the tank owner and seek reimbursement from the owner's insurer. This is called subrogation. The following 22 documented court cases show state funds doing exactly that. The question for Alabama is: why has not the ATTF done the same?

The Scarlet Thread — Citizen Action for Underground Storage Tank Accountability
Data source: UST Summary Package 2026-10-23 | Provenance-audited for Harris v. United States, S.D. Ala. No. 1:26-cv-00184
Every number traceable to primary source. See Evidence section for citations.

This site provides publicly available data and a petition template. It is not legal advice. Consult an attorney for legal guidance specific to your situation.