Underground Storage Tanks

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Information about LUST Recovery Act Assistance Agreement between U.S. EPA Region 4 and the State of Georgia as of July 9, 2009

In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Congress appropriated $200 million from the Leaking Underground Storage Tank (LUST) Trust Fund to EPA for assessing and cleaning up leaks from underground storage tanks. This money will pay for activities at shovel-ready sites and may be used either to:

Oversee assessing and cleaning up eligible underground tank leaks, or
Directly pay for assessing and cleaning up leaks from federally regulated tanks where the responsible party is unknown, unwilling, unable, or the cleanup is an emergency response.

Because the underground storage tank program is primarily implemented by states and territories, EPA allocated the vast majority of LUST Recovery Act money to state and territorial underground storage tank programs.

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Assistance Agreement between U.S. EPA Region 4 and the State of Georgia

Date Assistance Agreement was awarded: July 9, 2009

Amount of Assistance Agreement: $4,970,000

Summary of Work: The funds will be used to assess and clean up petroleum-contaminated orphan sites that have been identified as having no viable responsible party available to fund the work. These are sites that have been contaminated by leaks from Underground Storage Tanks. (USTs).

The assessment and clean-up work will be conducted by five state contractors that were selected this year based on a competitive bid process. All of the funds distributed under ARRA are slated for this contracted clean-up work. No funds have been set aside for administrative functions.

48 sites have been identified as being both eligible for ARRA money that can sufficiently be addressed either through the clean-up or initial assessment and site-ranking phase with the funds available through ARRA
An additional 50 sites have been identified that are eligible for ARRA funding but for which adequate funding is not available to conduct additional assessment or clean-up. These sites already have adequate data to determine the risk they pose to human health and the environment.

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Please note the information provided here comes from the EPA/state assistance agreement. Activities described are subject to change.