In the midst of America’s oil crisis, part of the University’s campus is playing host to an oil drilling site — but without the added benefit of supplementing national reserves.

Jimbo’s, a gas station located near Brumby Hall on Baxter Street, is the origin of an underground gasoline leak that has spread across 1.7 acres and continues to leak onto campus grounds. Representatives at the Georgia Environmental Protection Division said they were unable to determine how much gasoline has leaked into the soil.

State-hired engineers drill near Baxter Street to monitor the level of gasoline in the soil. Photo by: Katherine Poss

“That happened some time ago, and we haven’t been able to find out how far it has migrated yet,” said Undine Johnson, environmental engineer with the corrective action unit at the EPD. “It’s difficult to quantify because the leak has occurred over a number of years, and so once it gets into the soil it becomes difficult to measure.”

Gasoline has been leaking from the site since April 2005, when it was first reported.

Since then, the EPD has been attempting to determine the borders of the contaminated area so they can begin to remove the gasoline.

“In this particular site it went into the ground and you have a large amount of free product at the site,” Johnson said.

She said the EPD is looking to define the borders of the locations where gasoline concentrations are highest.

Johnson said the EPD hired an engineering consulting firm called MACTEC to drill monitoring wells in order to sample ground water and help determine these borders.

Approximately 20 wells have been drilled in the area surrounding Jimbo’s, including wells located at the Brumby parking lot.

Johnson hopes these last wells will determine the borders of the contaminated area.

Recently, rock sediment escaped one of the drilling sites near Brumby and joined with a tributary leading into Tanyard Creek.

Correspondence between MACTEC and University personnel indicate the escape of sediment from the site was due to low preventive measures on the part of MACTEC.

An e-mail sent to Bill Murdy, principal geologist of MACTEC, by John McCollum, associate vice president for environmental safety at the University, stated “protective measures were not being implemented to prevent the entry of turbid water to the UGA storm sewer system, which discharges directly to state waters.”

Attempts to reach Murdy for comment were unsuccessful Tuesday.

Johnson said the sediment escape at the site was due to a large amount of water used to flush the well, and that the well was not contaminated.

“Those concentrations should have been below anything you could detect in a laboratory,” she said. “There was no gasoline that was released from that well. “

However, Johnson said it would take 60 days or more to receive results on any contaminants that might be in monitoring wells now being drilled on campus.

“It takes about 30 days to analyze the material, and then about another 30 days to analyze it and write the report,” she said.

Though the gasoline in the soil is migrating through groundwater, Athens citizens should not experience problems with contaminated drinking water, Johnson said. She said when analyzing potentially affected wells, the EPD looks for benzene, a chemical found in gasoline. The standard benzene level approved for drinking wells is 5 parts per billion.

“That’s only applicable if there are drinking wells nearby that people use,” Johnson said. “Normally in a city area like this, they are on city water.”

Jamie Lewis, of the Athens EPD, said the EPD only monitors certain types of wells. Contamination in wells owned by only one household might be overlooked.

“We do regulate drinking water, well water, but it’s normally on a system of if there’s a park or trailer park that has a central well,” Lewis said. “But as to private wells, we would have no record of that.”

Johnson said Jimbo’s would not receive a fine because of the spill due to their haste in reporting it.

“They had closed out some tanks and as part of the closure they had to test the soil underneath the tank, and that soil came back with a positive hit. They are required by law to notify the EPD and we wanted them to investigate it a little bit further,” Johnson said. “Typically in these sorts of releases, they are not fined because they did report it.”

McCollum  said the University has had little involvement with the EPD’s investigation of the oil leak.