Oil Tank Removal in Montgomery County, PA

The Main Line end, Lower Merion and the villages through Bala Cynwyd, Narberth, Ardmore and Wynnewood, has the largest houses in the region outside the city. Large houses were heated by large tanks, frequently 550 or 1,000 gallons, and often buried well away from the building under what is now lawn or a paved drive.

The inner-ring townships and boroughs, Cheltenham, Abington, Jenkintown and Glenside, are denser and closer to Philadelphia in character. Smaller lots, more basements in use, more 275 gallon tanks, and access constraints closer to the city pattern.

The older borough cores, Norristown, Pottstown, Conshohocken, Ambler and Lansdale, have compact nineteenth and early twentieth century stock: narrow lots, party walls, and tanks in basements as often as in the ground. The western and northern townships are largely newer and gas from the start, which is why a tank there is more likely to be a genuine surprise.

Capacity sets the size of the hole, which sets the machine, which sets the access requirement. It sets how much product has to be pumped and manifested for disposal. And if the tank leaked, it sets the ceiling on how much oil could have entered the ground.

It also decides which Pennsylvania fund you are dealing with, and this is where Montgomery County owners get caught more often than most, because the county genuinely does have larger residential tanks. The DEP reimbursement program applies to underground heating oil tanks of 3,000 gallons or less. The separate USTIF voluntary heating oil program applies to nonregulated underground heating oil tanks of 3,000 gallons or greater.

Every ordinary residential tank, up to and including a 1,000 gallon Main Line tank, sits comfortably inside the DEP program. The reimbursement guide explains why the two funds get confused and which numbers belong to which.

Montgomery County does not issue building permits. Under the Pennsylvania Uniform Construction Code the municipality does, and the county is divided into more than sixty of them, split between townships and boroughs that run their code offices quite differently from one another.

The practical difference in Montgomery County is scale rather than number. A large township runs a full-time code department with published procedures. A small borough may not, and where a municipality has opted out of enforcing the code, residential work is handled by a certified third-party agency hired by the owner or contractor instead.

Either way the requirement is the same: the tank work is permitted work, and the sign-off at the end is the document worth having when the property is sold.

The Commonwealth layer above it does not fragment at all. Montgomery County sits in DEP's Southeast Region, so a confirmed release anywhere in the county is reported to the Southeast Regional Office in Norristown on 484-250-5900, inside the 24 hours that 25 Pa. Code section 245.305 allows.

On the bigger Main Line and northern properties, the tank is often nowhere near the house. It was placed where the delivery truck could reach it, which after seventy years of planting and paving can be under a lawn, a terrace or a driveway turning circle with no visible trace beyond a capped pipe.

That makes locating the first job rather than an afterthought, and it is why an oil tank sweep earns its cost on a large lot in a way it does not on a twenty foot rowhouse yard.

It also makes reinstatement a bigger share of the price than the removal. Mature planting, stone, and long paved drives are expensive to put back, and what gets restored to what standard belongs in the quote before the work starts.