Tank Talk - Alaska's Bulk Fuel Podcast

Spill Prevention: Smart Solutions Under $5k

• Integrity Environmental

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In this episode, we talk with Shannon Oelkers and Haley Hall from Integrity Environmental, diving into practical strategies for Alaska’s aging bulk fuel storage infrastructure. Shannon shares cost-effective tips, from managing water in tanks to maintaining connection points, all achievable for under $5,000 and with in-house labor. Learn how small changes like performing water draws, installing pressure-vac vents, and updating overfill prevention systems can mitigate spills and extend the life of your storage tanks. 
 
Tune in to discover actionable solutions and expert advice for navigating challenges in Alaska's unique fuel storage landscape! 

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Haley Hall:

Thank for joining us. You're listening to Tank Talk with Integrity Environmental, where we speak with founder, principal consultant and bulk fuel storage expert Shannon Oelkers, about regulations, safety and useful tips for smooth sailing through the bulk fuel storage industry. Come learn the unique joys of working life in Alaska with industry experts, including our team, vendors we work with, and companies we support.

Haley Hall:

Hi, welcome to Tank Talk Season 2. My name is Haley Hall and I'm a part of the Technical Writing team here at Integrity Environmental and I am here with our host, Shannon Oelkers, principal consultant and bulk fuel storage expert. So today we're here to talk about spill prevention and some smart solutions. So, Shannon, I hear a lot of tank farms in rural Alaska are getting older.

Shannon Oelkers:

It is true, Haley, Alaska is a state of aging infrastructure and this includes our bulk fuel storage facilities, especially in rural Alaska. Now there's a lot of really well-maintained firms out there. I don't want to give the impression that everything's fallen apart, but a lot of our infrastructure was built in the 1960s and 70s and it is still in place and it is slowly aging, especially like in smaller communities where bulk fuel storage is owned and operated by utilities or community organizations. There just hasn't been funding available since maybe the late 90s to replace or upkeep some of these facilities.

Haley Hall:

So what does aging infrastructure mean for Alaska?

Shannon Oelkers:

Well, to put it bluntly, the risks of a spill are much higher. They're much higher than they used to be, and the paradox here is that a spill could force a community or entity to spend money on the spill, remediation, responding to that spill, cleaning up after the spill occurs, and all of that money could have been much better spent on infrastructure improvement.

Haley Hall:

Gotcha. So I hear the costs of even a small spill are often equal to or more than the cost of a new tank.

Shannon Oelkers:

It's true. I mean a larger tank, like a 20,000 gallon double wall tank, could be over $200,000. And I don't have any analytical data. So tank is about 200K. We work with a lot of spill response. You know we partner with the Alaska Chateau Network and we do site characterization for a lot of our clients. After a spill no-transcript spill while we're waiting for, you know, a way to upgrade this infrastructure appears for the state of Alaska. There's not really a way forward that anyone's identified that makes sense yet.

Haley Hall:

Right. So is there anything our listeners, with very limited resources, can do to lower the risk of spills?

Shannon Oelkers:

There really is. There really is, which is why I'm here today. I want to talk about it because I think it's critical. There are several steps in high risk areas and these are things that can be done for relatively little money I'm talking under $5,000. They can be done with local labor, they don't require you to spend weeks of time doing them and I'll go over them but, like these are things that are achievable and doable on a pretty tight budget and they really lower the risk of a spill, so I think they're important to talk about.

Haley Hall:

Well, don't hold out on this now. What are these steps?

Shannon Oelkers:

There are four kind of the highest risk areas for a spill in a tank system. The first is water management both inside and outside of the tank. Overfill prevention systems, connection points, anything that's bolted or screwed onto a tank, and you know my personal favorite secondary containment. Those four areas are sort of the highest risk areas for spill. When something fails around those areas, that's when we see higher risks of spills.

Haley Hall:

Okay, well, let's start with water management. What do you mean by water management?

Shannon Oelkers:

So, like I mentioned, briefly when I brought it in. So, like I mentioned briefly when I brought it in, water corrodes steel. When it has a fuel source along with it, it eats the fuel, corrodes the steel, and so you put water, fuel and steel together and it's a corrosive environment. And so a lot of what we do, a lot of these tank systems are engineered and designed to keep water from interacting with steel in the fuel environment, and that's things like coatings and design, and those are bigger projects. But for what I'm talking about today, water management is removing water from where it comes into contact with the steel tank and piping to prevent that corrosion from occurring. So, like I said earlier, it can be inside the tank, but it can also be outside. So right now I just want to talk about inside the tank, and water can get inside of a tank a number of ways. The first is that it condenses on the inside of a tank, especially if there's lower volumes in the tank, just like a cold glass of water on a hot day. You'll see water forming on the inside of the tank and running down the inside, forming on the inside of the tank and running down the inside, and then you'll end up with water on the bottom, sandwiched between the fuel and the steel, which is an ideal climate for microbially induced corrosion, which I have a hard time saying but is commonly called MIC M-I-C. Other ways water can get inside of the tank is weather, and people who are not from Alaska listening to this conversation may maybe like Shannon, Weather? Yes, absolutely weather. If you have ever been to rural Alaska, the storms we see are as strong as any tropical storm or hurricane, but much colder, higher winds. And if you've got a tank and it's situated or oriented to where the vent can be blown into, you can have water come into that tank all year long. There's also introduced water. The most common example of this is you're receiving fuel from a barge and there's maybe a little bit of water from the bottom of the barge tank that comes into your system. Barges work really hard to filter and keep that out, but it does occur sometimes. But the other way water can be introduced in the system is if you're moving fuel from tank to tank to try to like I don't know, if you've got four tanks and you want to consolidate all of your fuel into one, you're going to be collecting the water from each of the tanks as you're decanting one into the other and you'll have water from the other three tanks plus the initial tank all in one. And so, as you're stripping tanks down, the water builds up plus the initial tank all in one. And so, as you're stripping tanks down, the water builds up into whichever tank is your feeder tank for a system like that. So keeping that water out can be important, but also removing the water on a periodic basis, and this is where we talk frequently about water draws.

Shannon Oelkers:

Everybody knows what a water draw is in the fuels industry, but I'll go over it again just in case somebody out there listening doesn't. A water draw is a routine maintenance procedure in which you find and remove water from the bottom of the tank. For horizontal tanks, which is mostly what I'm talking about here, it's either an appurtenance from the top and there's a drop tube that goes all the way to the lowest part of the tank so that you can suck the fuel out, or it's an access through the bottom of the tank and it'll go through the double wall, or just be directly from the shell of a primary single wall tank and it's a valve you can open to let fuel and water out of the bottom of the tank. Water draws are part of everybody's maintenance program. I have yet to meet a facility that doesn't have routine water draws as part of its operations and maintenance plan. But water draws don't happen, and there's a very specific reason for that, and this is what this whole conversation is leading up to is water draws are really hard to do, especially if you don't have equipment installed that makes it easier, and you don't have equipment to deal with the water and fuel that you pull out of the tank.

Shannon Oelkers:

And so if you don't have permanently installed equipment to make it easier, you are up on a tank busting nuts in the cold, in the rain. You're using a hand pump to suck out a tank. It's very difficult, it's not easy, and so what I would like to recommend this is something very easy to do for well under $5,000 is just permanently install things that make water draw access easier. There are systems that can go in. You know remember I mentioned some of these horizontals have top access for water draw Right. There are systems you can screw in that will allow you to use the hand pump at eye level or standing level next to the tank instead of being on top of the tank and for tanks that have water drawers on the bottom, there are systems that you can install that have hoses that are part of the system and you can turn the valve, install the hose into your bucket and sort of eliminate the spray and the management and trying to jam something in under the nozzle. And so my first recommendation is to get something permanently installed that makes water access easier and that will increase your staff's willingness and ability to do water draws Once they do a water draw.

Shannon Oelkers:

Every water draw is a mix of fuel and water. It's not like you open up the valve and water comes out and the tank's good. There's a little bit of fuel in the piping because when they fill the tank up, their fuel enters that system. You have to strip whatever's in that water draw line of fuel and then you get the water and then you have to have a place to let it sit so you can pull the water off the bottom and then return fuel either to the tank, depending on how clean it is, or maybe to like a waste oil burner. So, in addition to doing a permanently installed water draw access, we recommend having a decanting container and it's like a drum Haley, it's just a 55-gallon drum and there's a top with a funnel that you can pour your oily water mixture into. But there's some kind of faucet on the bottom and you let it sit and let the water and the oil separate and then you can pull the water off the bottom. But here's the kicker, because in the old days in the old days which we are not in anymore that water would just get stripped to the ground, but that water has been inside a fuel tank. It's contaminated, right, right. And so this also creates problems for people doing water draws, because they end up with drums with a bunch of oil and water in them, but they know they're not supposed to get rid of the water. And so I also suggest pairing some kind of water treatment system.

Shannon Oelkers:

And there's a couple that are really mobile and they're easy to use in rural Alaska and they're not that expensive. And the one I recommend the most is called a granular activated carbon system, or GAC, g-a-c. You know, rain for Rent sells these at like 1500 bucks. Again, it's a drum, it's loaded with granular activated carbon and you put oily water in the top and it filters through that carbon, just like a Brita filter does. I think Brita actually is a GAC system but you can put it through and out. The bottom comes clean water. And the nice thing about GAC drums is they start slowing down and working slower and slower as you use up the carbon. So it kind of tells you ahead of time that it's about to be exhausted and you can order refills once you buy that initial drum and the refills are like half the cost of the initial drum and they're a lot easier to ship. You can get a bag of activated carbon to come out, pull the old one out and it can be disposed of at the local landfill and you can put a new one in. I like that system a lot because it tells you when it's starting to not work good and you can bring in replacements. And it's generally pretty easy to use and if you keep it inside when you're not using it a shop, they can last years and years and years. They don't do as well if they're left outside to rust.

Shannon Oelkers:

There is another water treatment system that I think is pretty easy to use. It's called the AbsorbW system. It's a blue plastic drum. It has sorbent pillows inside of it. You can run oily water through it. It will connect and absorb the oil and let the water flow through. The only thing about the AbsorbW that I don't like is that if it stops working, you won't know the water will still go through at about the same rate. That one's very light, it's easy to ship, it's easy to store. A lot of people have them as part of their spill response kits because they're so easy to use.

Shannon Oelkers:

If you don't have a lot of water at your facility, if you're not generating a lot of water in your tanks, that might be a better choice for you. But if you've got hundreds of gallons a year that you need to treat, the GAC might be a better choice for you. So all of those things together, if you bought all of the infrastructure, the piping and the hand pump to improve water, draw access, and you buy a decanting container that will allow you to separate fuel from water, and you buy a water treatment system like the Gak Drum or the Absorb W, all of that together is under $5,000. And those are three things you can do right now. And then pulling water from your tank system is going to immediately lower the amount of corrosion that's going on, not just on the tank shell, but everywhere water pools. You know low spots, you know, behind flanges, against the gaskets. Getting the water out is pretty important. So one last thought on water management before we move on to overflow prevention.

Shannon Oelkers:

Water entering the tank can also be prevented, and one of the easiest ways to do this and cost-effective ways is installing something called a pressure vac vent on the tank and it utilizes pressure and vacuum to vent the tank.

Shannon Oelkers:

So when you're filling the tank, the pressure increases, a flap opens and lets any kind of air or vapor inside out, and when you stop filling the tank it falls down and it closes off and it keeps vapors from escaping the tank.

Shannon Oelkers:

Right, they're not required for diesel or jet A, but they are really good at keeping water out of the tank, especially if you're in one of those communities where the weather's intense and water is getting into the tank. As an auditor, I can tell you I've been to a lot of facilities where I show up and every single tank has a garbage bag taped or tied around the vent and I immediately know that they've got a water management problem and it's probably from water coming in the vents in some way. And pressure vac vents they're not that expensive, especially for horizontal tanks. They can be under $1,000. Wow, and so that's something that maybe put all of that together for your facility and you may be making a job or something that was really difficult for your people to handle much more easy, and it's a system that works really well. So that's all I got to say about water management inside the tank, and I'd like to talk about overfill prevention next, because that's also important.

Haley Hall:

Great, so let's talk about overfill prevention. The state of Alaska is reporting that 13% of spills in the last three years were from overfills.

Shannon Oelkers:

Yeah, 13% statewide in Alaska and it's a big problem for rural Alaska. And there's a couple of very specific reasons why following best management practices in the inventory taking a stick to the tank or gauging it, finding out how much fuel is in the tank before the barge comes, after the barge comes, and then also, as you use the fuel and draw it down, understanding how much fuel you have along the way. Overfills are also problematic, sometimes because of water. If you're not managing water in your tank and we have run into this multiple times You'll talk to somebody and you say how much fuel is in the tank and they say oh, let's pretend it's a 10,000 gallon tank for ease of conversation here. How much fuel is in the tank? 8,000 gallons? Oh, okay, 8,000 gallons. You would think that there's 2,000 gallons of freeboard of space in that tank, but what they're saying is there's 8,000 usable gallons floating on top of a layer of maybe six to eight inches of water, which is your water that has not been managed or removed right. And so sometimes having to do inventory math where you stick the tank and it says there's 13 feet of product in the tank or whatever, or 11, but some of its product and some of its water. That introduces enough math errors into the calculations that you can get overfills.

Shannon Oelkers:

The other reason overfills become a big problem is a lot of their pumping systems and return line systems have been damaged or have stopped functioning the way they were originally engineered to be or set up to be, and they have made workarounds. But that means some of the backup systems have failed, and that includes overfill valves. Like overfill prevention valves are not meant to last 70 years or 50 years or even 20. And some of the oldest overfill prevention valves I've seen when you pull them out of the tank they're stiff, they're crusted with gunk, they have little thin, you know activator arms that get bent, and so what we recommend is, if you have a overfill prevention valve on your tank and there's a couple different kinds, there's floats and there's whistle vents and there's some other things pull it out and maintain it. Make sure the float still works, make sure all the mechanical pieces still move, make sure there's not gunk blocking certain things so that you can't use the valve the way it's supposed to be, and maintain it. I mean, a brand new overfill valve for most horizontal tanks is under $1,500. And so we're not talking about an incredible amount of money for this. And then, lastly, overfill prevention can be significantly reduced just by improving visual gauging.

Shannon Oelkers:

So everyone listening to this, if they have a tank farm, I bet you somewhere right now at your facility there is a clock gauge on a tank and you know it completely is broken. It doesn't tell you anything like what reality is, because clock gauges, again, are not designed to work forever. Clock gauges, again, are not designed to work forever. They need to be calibrated and tuned up and adjusted all the time, and so if you have a gauge on a tank and it's not working, that is also money well spent. Spend the $750 to get a new clock gauge, keep it tuned. You're going to have to buy another one in five years.

Shannon Oelkers:

Yes, that's absolutely true. But that will help you prevent overfills because when someone looks at the tank they can see how much is in it, even if they're not super knowledgeable. We all know that, like, actually gauging the tank is the gold standard. There's a lot of people interacting with a tank looking to see how much fuel to put in the day tank for a transfer that maybe you're not going to be invested in that gauging. So, for overfill prevention, follow your inventory, best management practices, install, maintain and replace your overfill prevention valves and then improve visual gauging whatever that looks like for your system. Make sure that if you do have a gauge it's working. Consider installing a gauge if you don't have one. You don't need electricity for all gauge types. There are plenty of gauges that are manual and they don't require electricity, but if you are fortunate enough to have electricity at the top of your tank, you have many more options for gauging that are fairly reasonable. I think they would still be under $5,000.

Haley Hall:

Great Earlier Shannon, you mentioned connection points. What are those?

Shannon Oelkers:

Connection points. Is this where I make a bad joke about tank dating? Connection points are any place on a tank where piping and appurtenances are bolted or threaded to the tank and a lot can be done here for very low cost to reduce the risk of a spill and in integrity's experience I'll say it is our number one cause for physical or mechanical failure. If a tank has a spill it's almost always at one of these connection points. So connection points typically are like a bolted flange or a water draw valve or a piping connection of some kind, a fill line, a draw line, cargo line, however you want to look at it. So a couple thoughts on connection points. These are easy maintenance and operation repairs that you can do that cost very little but have a high effect on reducing spills.

Shannon Oelkers:

The first is gaskets. Gaskets are not superheroes. They cannot last forever. Gaskets are not superheroes. They cannot last forever. I have pulled gaskets that are 45 years old, 60 years old, and they are still working, which is amazing. But that's not how they were designed and I don't believe there's really a guidance on how long a gasket should last. I say 10 years is a good, nice, easy number. You should be drawing your tanks down and performing routine maintenance on a whole lot of other things attached to a tank. At the 10-year mark, replace all the gaskets. When you do that, and if you have a significant amount of water in your tank system, I would also maybe do it more frequently, because if water gets into the gap where the gasket and the flange meet, every time it freezes it's going to degrade that gasket a little more until it starts leaking. The other thing about flange connections and I've seen this a lot they take everything apart. They replace all the gaskets and then they put the same 45-year-old bolts and nuts back into the bolt holes. Replace those bolts and nuts. That's like $7 in parts, just do it. Bolts do eventually strip, they do eventually break or they can have fractures, just like other steel things on a tank. So replace the bolts and nuts every time you do work on a tank. It's such a small amount of money, just do it. And then a couple other thoughts on connections.

Shannon Oelkers:

Most people are really good about hydrostatically testing their piping between the marine header and the first valve of the tank farm because the Coast Guard requires it to receive fuel hydrostatic testing on all of your other lines and I think that's a really good idea, even above ground ones, because if they're leaking you'll know, and not every pipe looks like it's leaking, because it only leaks when it's under pressure right, especially gasket failures. Gasket failures you may not see fuel dripping out the bottom for a long time, but when you put the system in pressure because you're receiving fuel, it's going to have fuel pulsing out of it as the pressure goes up and down. So hydrostatically testing all your piping, especially below grade portions, that's going to give you a huge peace of mind that they're all working the way they should be and it will alert you right away if something has failed. And that I just I feel like that's something you can do right now to avoid a really big problem in the future. And then the last piece I want to talk to you about on connection points is adjusting pipe supports and leveling the tank.

Shannon Oelkers:

A lot of these facilities are on foundations of sand, riverbanks Like. There's a lot of shifty things that are sitting on permafrost which may or may not be melting, which may or may not be melting. As tanks age, especially older installations, you've got a lot of tension between the pipe and the tank, especially if they're sinking or moving at different rates. And those are really important things to manage right away before the tension becomes great. Because as the tension increases you've got piping that's pinched on the bottom and pulled at the top of every flange right, so you've got a gap at the top and a pinch at the bottom. Both of those are increased places of spills right, instead of having them be adjusted correctly, and even tension all the way around.

Shannon Oelkers:

Also, tension is really hard on tank shells. If you've got a welded pipe appurtenance, you know the neck of your flange coming off a tank but there's a ton of tension on it. The tank shell is only so thick and it can only take so much before it pulls it out of. You know distorts the actual shell of the tank. Also, tanks that are not level they put all kinds of stresses on other parts of the tank.

Shannon Oelkers:

So you can really reduce your spills by just continuously monitoring and leveling tanks and piping and I know that's not easy for humongous tanks like 50,000 gallon horizontals. That's probably not going to be doable with local labor. But if you've got a 6,000 gallon tank that can be moved with a loader with a set of forks, you can do that and it is possible. So I was just going to drop it there for set of forks. You can do that and it is possible, so I was just going to drop it there. For those of you who are able to do that, a once a year inspection of your piping and your tank with a little magnetic level to show you how level the tank is and how level the piping is, could really reduce the risk of a spill there.

Haley Hall:

Great. So, Shannon, are we ready for the secondary containment discussion?

Shannon Oelkers:

Oh, secondary containment. I feel like every podcast we do talks about secondary containment. For some reason it's everyone's favorite, right? So there's two types of secondary containment we see in rural Alaska, and this is where I remember at the very beginning of this I talked about water management inside the tank. Well, now we're going to talk about water management outside the tank. So the two kinds of containment the first is like what usually what people think of it is a berm or a dike and there's a liner inside of it and then the tank is placed inside the liner and if a tank were to fail, the fuel would fall into this bathtub liner and be held until we could recover it, and it's not going to spread or enter the water. It's going to be contained, right. So that's the first kind of secondary containment. The second is double walled tanks and that's where you have a horizontal tank and then they build a whole nother tank around it and then there's an interstitial space, which is the space between the inside tank and the outside tank. And if you've listened to this podcast, you know that the tanks are tightly sleeved together and the interstitial space is usually on the ends, the heads of the tank. There's not any space at all between the first and second wall, or very little. And then there's a gap on the ends, and I'm going to talk about things you can do to monitor and maintain both of these spaces, but I just wanted to talk about the two to kind of set it up.

Shannon Oelkers:

So let's talk about the secondary containment liner, the liner system, berm system. First. Liners and berms need constant maintenance, and if you don't do any for 20 years the system will fail, and so doing minor repairs and housekeeping can go a long way to extending the life of your liner. A four inch rip this year, after one bad winter with a whole lot of wind, could be a 24 foot rip next year because it gets blown apart by the wind. There are self-repair kits for liners. You can purchase them from almost any supplier, and sometimes you can purchase them from the manufacturer themselves, like Seaman Corp, for example, who's been on our podcast before. They have a repair kit specifically for their product. Those kits are very difficult for contractors to use, because the temperature has to be right, the humidity has to be right, it can't be pouring down rain, and so repairing minor problems on a liner is something that should be done by local crews, like if it's July and it's sunny, that is the day that you need to go fix the secondary containment liner, like hands down, like it's time, and it's very difficult to contract for that exact day in rural Alaska.

Shannon Oelkers:

The other thing about these secondary containment areas that's difficult for people is berms. Berms sink over time, especially if, for example, people are driving four-wheelers up and over into the secondary containment area for maintenance or inspection or whatever, or even walking, always in the same area where they walk in and there's not like a ladder or stairway in, you'll see it sink and just like the edge of a cup. If one part of the wall is four inches lower than the other parts of the wall, the water is going to go out. You know the short side, it doesn't matter how tall the rest of it is. And so constantly looking at your berm or wall height and making sure it's still the same height that it's supposed to be and rebuilding it back up, putting gravel back in to keep whatever level you've got will keep your capacity full. And then, speaking of capacity, the other thing that we see with secondary containment liners that can really affect your ability to hold fuel is things that reduce the capacity. So storing a lot of stuff in your secondary containment area can take up space and allow even if it could hold all the fuel from the tank. If the tank lets all its fuel go, if there's a lot of things in the way, it might overfill and go outside of the containment liner. We also see if you don't remove water from that secondary containment area, like storm water comes from the sky, rain or or snow melt if it is still in there when it freezes, you could literally have an entire secondary containment that is two-thirds ice and that is going to stay until the spring. And now you're only working with a third of the containment volume.

Shannon Oelkers:

Repairing liners, repairing berms and keeping your secondary containment area neat, tidy and free of obstacles and ice and water in general All of those things are part of routine operations and maintenance, but done every year well under $1,000. I think the patch kit's only 750 bucks. Right, you can have it on hand, but all of those together extend the life of your liner and extend your backup system in case the tank were to fail. So that covers the secondary containment area, the interstitial space on a double-walled tank. For a lot of these tanks this is a no-man's land. Nobody's ever looked in these ever. Sti SP-001 actually requires monthly and annual inspection of interstitial spaces.

Shannon Oelkers:

And things that make it difficult for people to inspect interstitial spaces is knowledge. They don't know they're supposed to A, b, and I have seen this more times than I care to admit. They never remove the shipping cover and so it's bolted shut, like you literally can't look inside the secondary containment of a double walled tank because it's just screwed shut, bolted shut. It's very difficult and sometimes they're done on purpose to keep water out, and that's fine too.

Shannon Oelkers:

But there are things you can install on a horizontal double walled tank to make inspection of that port easier. You can have a switch with a you know a flip lever to like wrench it down no-transcript space. It's very bad, that's like a catastrophic failure indicator. They're really common on day tanks, like in utilities, especially like self-diked tanks. You'll see a little turkey baster with the you know pop up red if something ever gets into the interstitial space. All of those types sensors, mechanical float gauges, just like the overfill prevention valves they need to be maintained too. I've had several times where I took the interstitial mechanical float and I pulled it out and the rod had rusted through and the float was just sitting in the bottom. There was no way it was ever going to work. It wasn't even connected anymore, but it was still there and it looked really nice on the top. So you do have to remove them and make sure that they still work.

Haley Hall:

So I know and I have seen that Integrity works with many companies on record keeping. How does record keeping play into reducing the risk of spills?

Shannon Oelkers:

Well, that's two words, haley. Early detection Inspections are meant to help you identify problems before they accelerate and get bigger, kind of fixing it while it's still cheaper. So remember that four inch tear to the liner that becomes a 25 or 24 foot tear. A good inspection will find fixable things while they are still fixable. And the other classic example is coatings. It's a lot easier to wire wheel a two inch by two inch coating failure and repair that coating with an epoxy coat than it is to do the entire top of a tank right.

Shannon Oelkers:

There are a few other things you can do with record keeping. You can actually perform your visual inspections Like don't pencil whip it, go through that tank, look for things you can solve today. If you can solve it today, it's probably not super expensive. Like, a lot of the really expensive things are longer term and require a lot more project management and funding. But if you notice that the clock gauge is broken and you can order a new clock gauge, that is something you can do today and you can fix it.

Shannon Oelkers:

I also like to recommend scheduled replacement of things that wear out, such as hoses, filters and gaskets. So we talked about gaskets 10 years, replace them. Even if they look great, replace them. Hoses and filters are a little more challenging. Filters eventually will stop working or slow down the flow of product when they get full. But if you've got a routine inspection and you've got some kind of budget where you buy them every three years or every year, it's a lot easier to replace them on a schedule than to wait until it's screwing everything up with a slow flow right and then hoses. They can look really good for a long time and then they fail. And so there are visual signs you can look for on hoses and we train our clients on elephant skin bulging. By the time you get to elephant skin and bulging, the risk of a spill is very high. And so if you've got hoses, depending on how frequently they're used, the temperature they're used at and how much bending or kinking they undergo or twisting, you can develop a replacement plan. If you've got a marine like a high flow marine hose on a dock and you're fueling up ships multiple times a day for three weeks in a row in Western Alaska, where it doesn't freeze, there are specific kinds of hoses for that, and replacing them on a routine basis is going to reduce the risk of spills, because you're not always going to be able to see when something's wrong or when the collar is about to break on a hose.

Shannon Oelkers:

And lastly, I want to talk about inventory monitoring. Inventory monitoring for our clients who sell fuel retail. They do this all the time. They need to know how much they sold each day. There's an accounting reconciliation. But for our clients that are using it to generate heat or generate power, like a school district or an electrical utility, they're looking at a daily burn rate, like how much they're using and how much in a day or a time period.

Shannon Oelkers:

If you don't have daily, weekly or monthly numbers, you're going to miss small leaks, like when a like, let's say, you have a drip at a bolted flange, right. Eventually over a year you might lose several hundred gallons of product to that drip, but you're never going to notice it because you're not noticing that the month beginning and the month end are off. Like you're supposed to be burning 1,500 gallons but you actually used 1,800, right? It's hard to find it without those numbers, what we also see too with inventories that are not reconciled. Frequently they'll have a spill and they don't actually know how much fuel got spilled. They know they received 20,000 gallons from the barge in May. The spill happened at the end of June. They think they were burning 800 gallons a day for so many days in a row and now when they stick the tank, you know they've got 6,000 gallons in there and there's not really a what went where, reconciliation.

Shannon Oelkers:

So inventory monitoring. It costs you time, right, you have to have your staff do it. But the reconciliation part is where somebody who is not at the terminal, right A supervisor, is reviewing those numbers and making sure they match up in an accounting method. It can really reduce the risk of a spill because you're looking at those numbers frequently. There's no guesses, there's no maybes, and if there is part of your equipment that's failing at a smaller scale, you're going to identify it right away before it becomes a big problem.

Haley Hall:

Right. So Shannon million dollar question Will this maintenance magically save your tank farm?

Shannon Oelkers:

No, sorry, haley, If you have an aging tank farm and it needs significant capital improvement projects, it's not going to save it, but the good news is it will extend the life of what you've got left and it will reduce the amount of spills you have or the volume of the spills you could potentially have. And that risk reduction is really important because the older this facility gets, the higher the risk goes, and so I'm sure a lot of you listening right now, if you have a 45-year-old gasket that's four different gasket changes that have been deferred. It's called deferred maintenance and getting caught up on deferred maintenance is really important, just like a car, if you never change the oil in a new car, it's not as bad as when the car is 60 years old.

Shannon Oelkers:

You've got to do these things to keep it going, and for a lot of the communities I'm talking about and interacting with Haley, they don't have a backup, they don't have a secondary option, and so this is really important. You can no longer go five years without doing a water draw, or 40 without opening up all of the bits of the tank and changing gaskets and bolts and greasing everything.

Haley Hall:

Are there any free or helpful resources that you can point our listeners to?

Shannon Oelkers:

Yes, I mentioned my favorite, sti SP001 monthly and annual inspections. That's a great place to start. If your facility has not done them before, it's a great place to start. The conversation Is the tank level. Is it grounded? Do we know what all the things on top of the tank are called and what they do? And going through that list will really help you assess where your tank is at, and it will help you identify which of the things I talked about today can be possible for you to reduce the risk of a spell.

Shannon Oelkers:

I also wanted to mention I talked a lot about some things that you can purchase for under $5,000 to help your facility reduce the risk of spills, and so I wanted to just call out a few of the places that we shop, because I think some people get stuck on. Well, where do I get these things, shannon? So Grainger, of course, sells a million things, but they have a lot of the water draw equipment like hand pumps and piping and threaded tubing attachments. They also carry some of the SCA repair kits that I talked about previously, although some liner companies have their own and you have to go to the manufacturer to get a repair kit, but Grainger can be a good place to find some of the things I talked about today. I definitely want to shout out Rain for Rent and Kenai repair kit. But Grainger can be a good place to find some of the things I talked about today. I definitely want to shout out Rain for Rent and Kenai. They've got decanting drums and water treatment systems and they will ship happily to rural Alaska. They're a great partner for us with that, and I'll include everybody's company information in the show notes.

Shannon Oelkers:

And then we talked a lot at the end about hoses and some of these industrial components filters. Arg Industrial can be really helpful for that and especially for hoses and gaskets. They also have a really deep bench of knowledge. They are also a former podcast interviewee. And then, lastly, for overfill prevention valves, there's a company called Northwest Pump and they sell all the components for horizontal tanks. If you need a clock gauge, you need overfill pumps. That's a good place to start, northwest Pump and they sell all the components for horizontal tanks. If you need a clock gauge, you need overfill pumps. That's a good place to start. Northwest Pump can pull those. They're Alaska reps for a whole bunch of different manufacturers. And then, lastly, as always, you can call Integrity and we can get you pointed in the right direction.

Haley Hall:

Amazing. Well, thank you so much, Shannon. I appreciate how you broke that down in manageable steps and I enjoyed our conversation.

Shannon Oelkers:

Yeah, thank you for having me talk about it and if you're listening and you do some of these steps, I would love to hear from you about how doable it was, if it really was under $5,000. And if you feel like it did reduce your risk of a spill. I'd love to hear some feedback and see if these things are working. Thank you, everybody. Thanks, hi there. This is Shannon Oelkers and, as the owner of Integrity Environmental, I wanted to take a minute here at the end of the podcast to make sure that you knew the following this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered legal or regulatory advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. This podcast is not intended to replace professional regulatory or legal advice, and the views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host that would be me or Integrity Environmental. Thank you very much for listening and if you do need professional regulatory advice, we'd be happy to help you as part of our consulting services.

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