An Oil Tale Bush Won't Put On His Resume

An oil company Texas Gov. George W. Bush once worked for was slow to clean up pollution from leaky gasoline tanks in Florida, documents show.

Underground storage tanks acquired by Texas-based Harken Energy Corp. leaked petroleum into the water supply near a Panhandle retirement home and threatened ocean waters in the Keys, according to records of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

In 1986, Bush served as a consultant and director for Harken in Houston after the company bought his almost bankrupt oil and gas exploration business. Bush held hundreds of thousands of dollars in Harken stock and earned between $50,000 and $120,000 per year.

Soon after Bush sold the company, Harken bought E-Z Serve Inc., which ran more than 900 retail gas stations. E-Z Serve stored petroleum products in more than 2,500 underground tanks across the South.

During Bush's tenure with Harken, between 1986 and 1992, environmentally hazardous gasoline and petroleum leaked from at least six E-Z Serve storage tanks in Florida, according to state DEP records.

A Bush spokesman said Thursday that all the E-Z Serve tanks were drained of any potentially hazardous material when the spills were discovered. But records show Harken was slow to clean up the chemicals, and in some cases, did nothing.

One of the worst spills was in Plantation Key, where three tanks spilled benzene and other toxins at levels dangerous to marine life into groundwater less than 600 feet from the Gulf of Mexico and 1,000 feet from the Atlantic Ocean.

An environmental consulting firm hired by Harken to correct the problem promised to clean the site within six months. The cleanup didn't occur until eight years later in 1994 after repeated prodding by state environmental officials.

A 1989 petroleum spill into soil near drinking wells and about 500 feet from a retirement home in north Florida has not been cleaned up 11 years later.

The three gasoline tanks at an E-Z Serve gas station in Fountain were taken out of service in 1989 after an inspection found traces of petroleum in monitoring wells. Harken was notified about the contamination by the state in July 1990.

Records show Harken did nothing to clean up the mess. The tanks were removed two years later only after the gas station changed hands and the state ordered an emergency review of the site.

Contamination to soil four feet down was described as excessive.

In June, the state agreed to clean up the spill, charging the cost to taxpayers.

The Fountain site was listed as a “potential” threat to drinking water under a state program created to clean up petroleum spills, said Mike Sole, assistant director of waste management for DEP.

Bush spokesman Dan Bartlett said the problems with E-Z Serve tanks were acquired by Harken and the company put people in place to monitor tanks and find leaks.

“Their policy was when a lek was found that they immediately addressed it and worked with state authorities to correct it,” Bartlett said. “It is not true the assertion that Harken was dragging its feet.”

Sole confirmed that it's not unusual for a clean up to take a decade.

“There are some cleanups where we can be as aggressive as we can and it takes 8 or 11 years to get it cleaned up,” Sole said.

About the same time the E-Z Serve spills occurred, Florida legislators passed a bill allowing petroleum companies to apply for reimbursement from state coffers for costs associated with petroleum leak cleanups.

The state DEP estimated there were 1,000 to 2,000 such spills in the state and the government wanted to provide companies an incentive to get rid of the potential public health threat.

Harken didn't participate in the program.