Know your oil tank, advises a Whitehorse resident facing a huge cost to clean up a spill.

Longtime Whitehorse resident Kevin Murphy thought it odd when he went through a full tank of home heating fuel in not much more than a month this past winter.

He called for a refill, on a Sunday, but when the delivery truck arrived, the driver noticed fuel had leaked onto the ground from the two-year-old horizontal Tidy Tank tucked beneath the deck.

There were no signs of a failure – of any sort. No signs of a loose fitting, nor a breakdown of the welded seams. No ruptures.

When they picked up the tank, however, the fuel remaining inside shifted and began weeping out the wall of the tank, where there were no visible signs of any problem.

"You couldn't see a hole in the tank, but the oil was pouring through.”

Murphy figures he's looking at a cleanup bill of $20,000-plus.

His local insurance company office denied his claim for assistance, but agreed to bump up his appeal to the next level.

The answer came back last week. No. The local representative said the insurance company's legal team advised against providing the customer with an explanation, Murphy said.

Now he's had to hire a lawyer, and until he gets to the bottom of things, he's using a 10-gallon tank to store his fuel.

Murphy is not sure if there's an issue with the fuel tank manufacturer, the fuel company, or if any liability rests with the previous owner who installed the new tank to replace an underground tank just before selling to Murphy in August 2008.

Nobody told him when he moved in that the shiny new fuel tank under the deck might fail in two years, so be careful, he cautions others.

All he knows is he's holding the bag so far, and he's not sure if he can do anything about it.

But from what Murphy understands, his family's predicament is not so unusual these days.

While relating his story to friends, he's heard of how Buddy next door knows somebody down the street who had the same thing happen to them.

Indeed, the Yukon Housing Corp. has confirmed in the last couple of years it has had several newer home heating tanks fail, tanks that were fewer than five years old. But a local supplier insists it's not a problem with fuel tanks.

Dev Hurlburt of Hurlburt Enterprises Inc. said since the federal government's decision to impose tighter restrictions on sulphur content in fuel there's been an increased danger of accelerated corrosion inside home heating tanks. The local Tidy Tank supplier said it's not a product-specific issue; that failures are occurring in brands across the board. (See separate story, p. 7.)

Murphy suggested if this corrosion issue is a new realty, homeowners need to be made aware.

"It's cost-prohibitive for any normal guy pulling down a regular salary who's not expecting to be hit with a $20,000 bill,” he said. "The work that has to be done is somewhere right around that level or more.”

Zeke Aasman has been there.

Just weeks before he bought his home in March 2006, the previous owner replaced the underground fuel tank with a new above-ground tank.

It failed last summer.

After Aasman and his wife, Rona, returned home one day, Rona smelled a slight odour of fuel that Aasman could barely detect himself.

He went through the crawl space looking for leaks and checked out the furnace, but saw nothing.

Leaving the house for work the next morning, the smell of diesel was overpowering.

Immediately, Aasman thought of the fuel tank.

Sure enough, there was a steady trickle emerging from a small hole rusted through the bottom of the tank manufactured in 2005, and installed in March 2006.

It had been topped up the week before, and with what AFD pumped out after the failure was noticed, Aasman estimates 600 litres or more had gone into the ground around the house, almost overnight.

He contacted the Department of Environment and was told what had to be done.

All the contaminated soil – a little more than two dump trucks' worth – was removed and remediated at an approved local facility.

They had to dig down to the footings, and underneath them to get at the contaminated soil in the crawl space.

The insurance company turned down their claim, and the young couple was forced to cover the cost of the cleanup with savings they had accumulated to build a new home.

It was only after they retained a lawyer, who began sending around e-mails, that the insurance company eventually agreed last fall to cover the entire bill at just under $30,000, minus Aasman's legal fees and the $1,500 cost for a new tank.

"The biggest frustration and stress for me was trying to get my insurance company to listen and to get them to own up to their responsibility,” he said.

There are definitely grey areas in the fine print of insurance policies which companies can use to deny claims – that is, until lawyers help them understand the other side, he suggested.

Aasman said he isn't blaming anyone. Mistakes happen. But he does hope if there's an issue out there, something is being done to address it.

It would also be helpful, he suggested, if there were tougher regulations, such as requiring double-walled tanks, or the installation of concrete catch basins under home heating fuel tanks.

Aasman said he'll be heating with wood in his new house, with electrical backup – no furnace, no fuel tank.