Oil Tank Removal in Bucks County, PA

Levitt and Sons built slightly more than 17,300 houses in Lower Bucks between 1952 and 1958, in only six models, on concrete slabs using precut components. That last detail is the one that matters here. A slab-built house has no basement, so a Levittown house does not have a basement oil tank, and never did.

If there is a tank, it is outside: buried in the yard, under a driveway or patio, or standing above ground against the house. That single fact changes the starting assumption for the entire job, from what to look for to what equipment turns up.

It also changes what a fill pipe on a wall means. On a rowhouse it might feed a basement tank two feet inside. In Levittown it runs to something in the ground.

Levittown is a census designated place rather than a borough or a township, and the development spreads across portions of Bristol Township, Falls Township, Middletown Township and Tullytown Borough.

That has a direct consequence for permits. Two identical Levitt houses on the same original model, a few streets apart, can sit in different municipalities and therefore under different code offices with different forms and fees. A Levittown mailing address does not tell you which one, and the address is what decides it.

Under the Pennsylvania Uniform Construction Code the municipality administers permits, not the county. Over 90% of Pennsylvania's 2,562 municipalities enforce the code locally; where one has opted out, residential work is enforced by a certified third-party agency hired by the owner or the contractor.

Bristol, Morrisville and Yardley along the Delaware are considerably older than Levittown, with nineteenth and early twentieth century stock, full basements, narrow lots and party walls. Tanks there behave like Philadelphia and Delaware County tanks, in basements as often as in the ground, and the access constraints are the same ones.

Bensalem, Langhorne, Newtown and Warminster are mixed, with pockets of pre-war housing inside a lot of later development. Doylestown and the boroughs of upper Bucks, Perkasie, Sellersville and Quakertown, have older cores again.

Rural upper Bucks is the outlier in the other direction: larger properties, longer driveways, farmhouses, and correspondingly larger tanks placed wherever a delivery truck could reach. On those properties, finding the tank is a real exercise and an oil tank sweep is worth the cost before anyone digs.

The Commonwealth rules do not vary by municipality. A confirmed release has to be reported to the appropriate DEP regional office as soon as practicable and no later than 24 hours after confirmation, under 25 Pa. Code section 245.305. DEP's Southeast Regional Office in Norristown covers Bucks, and its line on 484-250-5900 is answered around the clock.

The Pennsylvania reimbursement is the same too: for underground heating oil tanks of 3,000 gallons or less, eligible cleanup costs above a $1,000 deductible are reimbursable up to a maximum of $4,000, where the release occurred or was discovered on or after January 30, 1998.