Oil Tank Abandonment In Place

The case for leaving a tank where it is comes down to what removing it would destroy. A tank sitting under a load-bearing footing, beneath a finished basement slab, under a structure that would have to come down, or in a rear yard with no access route wider than a person, is a tank where excavation costs more in reinstatement than the removal is worth.

It is a judgement about that specific property, not a general preference. On an open Philadelphia yard with rear access, removal is almost always the better outcome, because it ends the question instead of managing it.

The tank is emptied and cleaned of all residual oil, then opened and inspected so it can be confirmed as an empty shell rather than assumed to be one. Only then is it filled. Sand, concrete slurry and foam are all used; foam has the practical advantage of reaching voids and corners that sand and slurry bridge over.

Soil samples from around and beneath the tank are the part that cannot be skipped. Filling a tank does not establish that it never leaked, and a fill placed over contaminated ground simply seals the evidence in place while the obligation continues to exist.

Philadelphia treats this as permitted work in the same way as a removal. The City requires a building permit to install or remove a hazardous material tank, filed by a licensed contractor, and the resulting Certificate of Approval is part of what makes the closure provable.

What a future buyer, lender, insurer or title company is buying is not the fill. It is the record: a narrative confirming the tank was entered and cleaned of residual oil, the soil sampling results from beneath it, the disposal manifests, and the City sign-off.

Without that set, an abandoned tank is functionally identical to an unknown tank. Nobody can tell from the surface whether the shell was cleaned before it was filled or whether anyone looked at the soil, so the safe assumption made by everyone with money at stake is that neither happened.

Philadelphia has a large stock of tanks filled with sand in the 1980s and 1990s, most of them with no paperwork whatsoever. If that is your property, the honest position is that you do not know what is under the yard, and neither does anyone else.

The options are to leave it and expect it to surface at sale, to sample the soil around the tank to establish whether there is a problem, or to remove the tank and close it out completely. Which of those makes sense depends on whether you are staying or selling, and the selling and buying considerations work through the transaction side.

It does not remove the obligation attached to a release. If the tank leaked, the contamination is still there and Pennsylvania's reporting requirement still applies from the moment a release is confirmed, under 25 Pa. Code section 245.305.

It does not guarantee a mortgage will close. Some lenders and insurers will not finance or insure a property with a tank abandoned in place, even with complete documentation, and that is their decision rather than a matter of compliance.

It does not make the tank disappear from a disclosure. A tank you know about is a tank you know about, whether it is full of oil or full of foam.