Officials Order City Gas Tank Shut Down
Marc Albert,  Berkeley Voice, November 26, 1998

City officials reopened the municipal fueling station at the Second Street Transfer Station Monday after removing a problematic gasoline tank. The action brings up the larger sleeper issue of where to fuel Berkeley's fleet of 500 publicly owned vehicles.

Community Activist L A Wood has been fighting City Hall for six years asking officials to study new locations for fueling. Wood complains that the Public Works Corporation Yard lies in the midst of a residential area and hundreds of city vehicles rumble through to fuel up.

Wood has recommended officials enlarge the Transfer Station gas tank and have its use take over some of the traffic from the Corp Yard. The traffic would then be on Gilman Street, a major thoroughfare and not residential streets.

Public Works Director Andreus Kreutzer, however, maintains Wood's plan would not work, noting that the intersection lacks a traffic light. Kreutzer said the unsignaled intersection makes entry and exit from the Transfer Station difficu1t. "Probably a third of the fleet go to Second Street every day," counters Wood. "They are down there anyway, so why can't they fuel then? The argument doesn't stand."

Wood has campaigned against the repair of the smaller tank calling it "Penny wise, but pound foolish," and demands that the city replace it with one 10 times larger. The activist may have hit a stumbling block. Instead of sharing fueling operations, now all gasoline powered vehicles will be going to the Corp Yard.

According to officials, many buildings at the Corporation Yard are made of un-reinforced masonry, necessitating yet another multi-million dollar seismic retrofit. A plan was floated several years ago to relocate the Corp Yard to a new facility at the lower Harrison Tract. Lower Harrison was recently approved for a soccer field. Under the rejected proposal the current yard would have been turned into a field if Harrison became the new Yard.

Officials also proposed contracting out refueling to a private contractor, purchasing an abandoned gas station, or negotiating a discount deal with an oil company to fuel city vehicles from ordinary gas stations.

Wood complained that no conclusive study has been undertaken to find out where city vehicles go and where the most efficient location for a fueling station is. Wood worries that the city wastes fuel simply making extra trips to the corp yard to fuel up.

If a long-term solution remains to be seen, officials did act decisively this week. Public Works officials brought the Transfer Station's diesel filling station online and abandoned the 1000 gallon gasoline tank.

"The tank has been shut down," said Berkeley's Toxics Division Director Nabil Al-Hadithy. "I don't think there is a plan to replace it. They had a plan to upgrade it, but it failed when they yanked it out of the ground. My inspector said it looked quite good but we took the prudent step of not allowing them to upgrade it," he said. Al-Hadithy said the gasoline tank failed a pressure test.

"Naturally, the fleet of diesel trucks couldn't get in there with the excavation. They couldn't wait for new city permits for the gasoline tank." The diesel tanks fuel city garbage trucks.