The Utah Attorney General's Office has opened an investigation into reports that Top Stop Convenience Stores may have known about a leaking underground fuel tank long before a 20,000-gallon gas leak last summer in Gunnison.
An initial investigation by the state's attorney general's office last fall cleared Top Stop of any wrongdoing in that particular incident since the company notified the state of the leak as soon as it received a report that one of its tanks had failed a statistical test and since there is no law in Utah law against failing to report a leak.
But continued circulation of rumors that Top Stop knew about the problem as far back as 2005 has prompted officials and investigators to ask more questions.
"The (Department of Environmental Quality) contacted me and asked me to get involved again because they keep hearing mutterings," Lt. Patty Ishmael, the AG investigator on both the first investigation and the current one, said on Wednesday.
"Gunnison has been dealt a blow. The city has truly been victimized. Whether it was a criminal victimization is why I'm involved," she said.
The "mutterings" she spoke of include reports from business owners in the area of smelling gas some 2 1/2 years ago, and purported rumors that local Top Stop employees knew of the problem but were told to not say anything by corporate officials, and even that, perhaps, the corporate office changed records to hide inventory discrepancies.
"We continue to hear from the public persistent rumors that perhaps the leak was happening before last July, and even though we don't have any evidence of that at this time, we felt like it was worth going back and making sure that we had adequately investigated the situation," said the DEQ's Brad Johnson, who heads the department's Division of Environmental Response and Remediation, which oversees ongoing cleanup of the situation.
Ishmael, too, referred to the lack of hard evidence, and said her investigation needed to find something more reliable than rumor. "We keep hearing people saying this and that, but nobody will step forward and tell us what they know and how they know it," Ishmael said.
Gunnison City's attorney Peter Stirba was pleased at the decision to start an investigation.
"It's an interesting development. Certainly we've felt all along that the review done initially by the state concerning possible criminality here was terminated prematurely. So we are pleased to see that the matter has been reopened," he said.
That initial review, by Ishmael's admission, relied heavily on Top Stop's records of the July leak. This time, though, Ishmael plans to visit Gunnison and conduct interviews.
"This is a last-ditch effort to see if Top Stop did any criminal wrongdoing. If people have information they need to step forward, they need to do the right thing and tell us about it. Confidential informants and people who want to stay anonymous — that doesn't help us at all."
Ishmael may also perform a more detailed examination of Top Stop's records, said the DEQ's Johnson. The DEQ has requested the Gunnison store's daily inventory records going back two years prior to the leaky tank's removal in August.
Johnson said the request was made primarily to help determine just how much fuel may have been lost rather than on potential wrongdoing by Top Stop, but said, "certainly as part of what we're doing we'll check into that," as would the AG's office.
On Thursday, Top Stop President Craig Larson said his company was complying with the records request, sending them to the state that very day, and that the company had complied with all other requests for information by the state.
As for the rumors that the state has heard, and is acknowledging through its investigation, Larson said, "I think they're categorically false."
E-mail: john@sanpetemessenger.com