By Noah Arroyo, Mission Local
What the Mission District lacked in rich people, it made up for in gas stations.
Because the neighborhood was a major transportation corridor, “they were everywhere,” said Albert Lee, who handles many of the city’s cleanup cases as a senior inspector for the Department of Public Health’s Local Oversight Program.
The legacy of that bounty is contamination. Early tanks were built with steel that inevitably corroded and leaked. Other neighborhoods, like wealthy Nob Hill, also experienced contamination leaks, but theirs came from personal heating-oil tanks, Lee said.
A map of contaminated sites in the Mission shows 157 former and 15 ongoing sites. The contamination “plumes” come almost exclusively from older-generation underground storage tanks where gas stations stored gasoline, said Chuck Headlee, the underground storage tank manager for the S.F. Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board.
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