Oil Tank Removal in Chester County, PA

An estimated 26% of Pennsylvania's adults rely on private well water as their main drinking water source, and Chester County's rural townships are firmly in that share. Where a property is on a private well, there is no utility monitoring what comes out of the tap.

Heating oil that reaches the ground near a well head is therefore a different order of problem from the same release in a paved suburban yard. It is the one situation in this trade where the honest advice is to stop guessing and sample early, before an excavation is backfilled and the evidence is buried under clean fill.

Most properties on well water are also on on-lot septic, which puts a second buried system in the same ground. Knowing where the septic tank, the distribution box and the drain field sit before an excavator arrives avoids turning a tank removal into a septic repair.

Chester County's older rural stock was heated by whatever could be delivered, and the tank went where a truck could reach it rather than where it would be convenient to dig up seventy years later. On a farmhouse that can mean a large tank well away from the building, sometimes more than one, and sometimes one that was replaced rather than removed when the first failed.

Above-ground tanks are more common here than in the inner suburbs, standing against an outbuilding or on a stand beside the house. They are the easiest to remove and the easiest to overlook, because the ground beneath a tank that has been weeping at a fitting for a decade is soil that has never been looked at.

Long unmade driveways are their own constraint. Getting a machine and a haulage truck to a tank several hundred feet from the road, across ground that has to be left usable, is part of the job rather than an afterthought.

Rural properties are also where buried services are least well recorded, which makes the Pennsylvania One Call notice worth more than the three to ten business days it costs. What that involves is on the underground removal page.

West Chester, Phoenixville, Coatesville, Downingtown, Kennett Square and Oxford have compact older cores that behave nothing like the surrounding townships. Narrow lots, party walls, basements in use, public water and sewer, and tanks that are as likely to be in a basement as in the ground.

Work in those boroughs looks much more like Delaware County rowhouse work than like a farm at the western end of the county, and it should be quoted that way.

Chester County does not issue building permits. Under the Pennsylvania Uniform Construction Code the municipality does, and over 90% of Pennsylvania's 2,562 municipalities have elected to enforce the code locally.

The wrinkle in a largely rural county is availability rather than complexity. A small township may run its code office limited hours, and where a municipality has opted out of enforcing the code, residential work is handled by a certified third-party agency engaged by the owner or contractor, with the Department of Labor and Industry taking commercial work.

That affects timing more than cost, and it is worth knowing about early if the removal is tied to a settlement date.

A confirmed release must be reported to the appropriate DEP regional office as soon as practicable and no later than 24 hours after it is confirmed, under 25 Pa. Code section 245.305. Distance from the city makes no difference to that: the western end of Chester County reports to the same Southeast Regional Office in Norristown, on 484-250-5900, as a rowhouse in the city.

Nor does it change the reimbursement. 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, set out in full on the reimbursement page.