Tanks for the memory

How does one kill an entire day and improve the environment? This isn't a riddle. Today was the day we scheduled the removal of our oil tank from underground in front of our house. You can't sell your house these days with a tank underground for fear that it's leaking. No lenders will lend and no insurance companies will insure. The biggest fear of all, however, is IF there is leakage you have to have an EPA inspection along with a cleanup. I've heard many a horror story so naturally I delayed doing this thinking that would actually make it better.. I had heard about people spending up to $75 thousand to clean up contamination.

We had a yard full of trucks including back hoes, front hoes, nasty hoes and about 6 workers. To their credit they seemed to be very coordinated and hit the different areas in teams. It was like an immunity challenge on "Survivor" without the Tiki lights. I tried to stay in the house and let them do their work but my neurosis wouldn't allow me not to check out every rumbling noise coming from the driveway or the boiler room. Overall it was very interesting to see how the job went. It was somewhat what I expected but more coordinated. Certain guys showed up during the day, did their part and disappeared.

Before we could fire up the new tank we had to have it inspected by our town engineer. He was late but luckily one of the tankmeisters knew him and got him to come by so they could continue the project and we could re-gain hot water. We passed that inspection fine and the new tank was filled with fresh oil - Texas tea, black gold..Things seem to work fine and we had minimal damage to our yard which needs reworking anyway..

The main guy told us we should have bought a lottery ticket this day since we actually dodged the bullet and had no leaks in our tank. He said that about 70% of jobs have leaks which require a clean up. Jeeeesh, I am glad I didn't know that beforehand. I would have pictured some kind of crazy hazmat team camped out in our yard checking all the dirt molecules and a taxi-style meter running as they did their sanitizing. So now I guess we SHOULD buy that lottery ticket since one of those wacky megaball, megamondo lotteries is now at some kind of $158 Million dollar level..Just how the hell DO you buy one of those and can you pad your order with a slurpee?