Oil Tank Removal in Delaware County, PA

Upper Darby, Lansdowne, Darby, Collingdale, Sharon Hill and Yeadon run continuously out of West Philadelphia and are built the same way: brick twins and rows, narrow lots, full basements, small rear yards, and a fill pipe on the side wall of a startling number of them.

Further out the pattern breaks up. Havertown and Drexel Hill are largely detached and semi-detached houses on wider lots, which usually means the tank is genuinely buried in a yard or under a driveway rather than sitting in a basement. Media and Swarthmore have older and larger properties again, and Radnor at the Main Line end has the biggest houses and the biggest tanks in the county.

That spread matters because it decides the method before anyone quotes. A basement tank in a Lansdowne twin is a cut and carry job. A buried tank under a Havertown driveway is an excavation with a surface to reinstate.

Philadelphia has one Department of Licenses and Inspections. Delaware County has no equivalent, because the county does not issue building permits at all. By the county's own account it covers over 184 square miles divided into forty-nine municipalities, and under the Pennsylvania Uniform Construction Code, established in 1999, each of them administers permits itself. Over 90% of Pennsylvania's 2,562 municipalities have elected to enforce the code locally.

In practice that means a Lansdowne job and a Yeadon job three streets apart are two different offices, two sets of forms and two fee schedules, several of them belonging to boroughs of about a square mile with a part-time code office and limited hours.

Where a municipality has opted out, the position is different again: certified third-party agencies hired by the property owner or the contractor enforce the residential requirements, and the Department of Labor and Industry handles commercial work. Establishing which of those applies to your address is the first thing that happens, and it is our job rather than yours.

The awkward part of Delaware County work is almost never the tank. It is the fifteen feet between the tank and somewhere a truck can legally stand.

The borough streets against the city line were laid out for houses, not for machinery. Many rows have no rear alley at all, so the only route to a back yard is through the house or through a neighbor's property, and the shared driveways serving paired twins are frequently too narrow for a mini excavator and belong to two owners rather than one.

None of that stops the job. It does change it, from a machine excavation into a hand dig, or from lifting a tank out whole into cutting it into sections. It is the single biggest reason two quotes for what looks like the same tank come back at very different numbers, which the cost page works through.

The Commonwealth rules apply identically in Delaware County and in Philadelphia. A confirmed release must 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. For Delaware County that office is DEP's Southeast Regional Office in Norristown, on 484-250-5900.

So does the money. The Pennsylvania reimbursement for cleaning up a leaking underground heating oil tank of 3,000 gallons or less pays eligible costs above a $1,000 deductible up to a maximum of $4,000, and it does not care which municipality the tank sits in. The reimbursement guide sets out the eligibility test.