Communities and our nation are very much concerned about the protection of our water supply. In Saturdays front page (July 28 Ann Arbor News), "House Restores Tougher Rules On Drinking Water". It doesn't take a rocket scientist to foresee that the quantity of our unpolluted drinking water is going to decrease. We must modify the way we are doing things, we must at least do the obvious things to protect our water supply such as not building an expressway size gas station next to an important water source, the Huron River that provides the majority of the drinking water for downstream cities and communities.
If a project such as this goes ahead, it should be designed to be as close to a zero tolerance * system as possible in order to insure that an accident doesn't happen that may pollute our water source and the local aquifer. The developers do not have a clean record, their currently operating stations have had leaks in the past. This doesn't exactly give one a sense of confidence that they can build and operate a gas station at a very sensitive site that requires a very low probability of pollution. Their design has not been used at another location, it is untried and untested. The design has been modified many times and usually only when someone points out to the developers that some safety aspect to the environment is lacking. Then they modify the design to satisfy the complaint. They have not voluntarily designed a complete system to protect the environment. This method of design indicates to us that they don't know what they are doing or that they are only willing to do the minimum for the environment unless there is a complaint. We simply do not have confidence in this gas station design. We don't want to be a guinea pig for this new untested and untried design that is sure to have problems that may result in the pollution of the Huron River. When they were asked about the failure rates of their monitoring instruments they couldn't answer the question. The lack of this information makes it impossible to compute a value for the reliability of the system.
We highly recommend to the Planning Commission, the ZBA and Other officials to deny the conditional use permit based upon the above arguments.
zero tolerance system -- a system that doesn't fail close to a zero tolerance system -- as used in this case a gas station that has very few problems and has a very low probability of polluting the nearby ground water and the Huron River.
If you have comments about this issue, send email to NoGasStation@aol.com