City orders drain closure after gas spill
By Gordon Dritschilo
Staff Writer
AUGUST 25, 2015
Rutland, Vermont
City officials are taking action after they say a local repair shop, Bruno’s Auto Repair , drained a gasoline tank into the municipal sewer.
Public Works Commissioner Jeffrey Wennberg said Monday he had sent a letter to Bruno’s Auto Repair giving them until Sunday to either produce the permits it is supposed to have for a floor drain at its North Main Street facility or to disconnect the drain from the city sewer. Wennberg said the penalty for noncompliance would be fines of $500 a day.
Wennberg said state officials were investigating the spill.
The gas spill at Bruno’s, which took place a week and a half ago, figured prominently in the discussion Monday before the Public Works Committee on the water issues on Melrose Avenue and North Street. While the source of the water plaguing residents there remains a mystery, homeowners and officials seemed comfortable blaming the contamination in the water flowing through some of those properties on the repair shop.
Residents and members of the Board of Aldermen urged that thorough testing be done on the line leading from the drain before it is closed off. Wennberg said he intended to at least perform a dye test to see where discharge from the drain might be emerging.
Wennberg said the spill incident took place Aug. 14 after a pickup dropped its gas tank and was towed to Bruno’s with the tank strapped into place. Some time later, he said, residents of North Street complained of a gas smell coming from the catch-basins. The fire department responded with equipment that measures vapor concentrations and found it at “explosive levels” in the catch-basins.
Wennberg said firefighters traced the gas back to Bruno’s garage. Nobody was at the facility when they arrived, he said, but they saw the gas tank on the floor of one of the bays, draining through a hose into a floor drain.
“Vapor levels were so high it took an hour to air out the building until it was safe for people to go into,” he said.
Wennberg said a floor drain in an auto repair shop cannot be legally hooked into a septic system at all, and can only go into a municipal sewer with state and local permits. He said the state had hired a consultant to trace the contamination, and the incident had been referred to the enforcement division of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources as well.
Reached Monday night, Bruno’s owner Mike Bruno said he had not heard from the city or the state regarding the incident and that he disputed Wennberg’s account. Bruno said the gas tank was secured inside the shop for the night with a drain pan beneath it.
“By no means did we have something intentionally draining,” he said. “No. Absolutely not. ... To my knowledge, there was no hose leading to a drain or anything like that. ... There was a drain there and the fumes — it was the fumes that caused the problems.”
gordon.dritschilo @rutlandherald.com