I can’t imagine. Cleaned up lots of fires, sewer back up, skunk disasters. But fuel oil?
Anything porous or absorbent will have to go. You can pressure wash and seal concrete, run ozone and air scrubbers and hydroxyl generators, but I don’t know if you could ever fully seal surfaces and fully eliminate that odour.
Our environmental people would go apeshit over 5 gallons of jet fuel = fancy kerosene spilled on utterly impervious outdoor concrete. The fire department got pretty worked up too.
This makes me think “Superfund site.”
Or the handyman that the owners hired.
That’s not the type of mistake many people would anticipate, though. In addition to the Spanish Inquisition, no one expects someone would come and dump oil there. You know you aren’t going to order any by mistake.
It’s unfortunate because it should have been an easy fix.
This happened to someone in my hometown years ago. I don’t recall all the details but I remember hearing that they lost most of their furniture, clothing, anything that could absorb some odour in the house. It took over a year of clean-up and repair before they could get back into the home because the whole house had to be gutted to replace wood and drywall which had absorbed odour. A fire would have been easier to recover.
If I remember correctly the house did have an oil tank, but it had either been moved or there was some other pipe that was no longer used that was mistaken for the active one. They were the intended recipients of the oil, it just went down the wrong hatch.
Bulldoze the house. Throw away 100% of the posessions. Dig out the dirt 10 feet down, refill w fresh dirt, and start over.
All else is ineffective folly.
Spilled petroleum is Devil’s Juice.
The AI- generated YouTube ads are getting weird. (Clip in the Bluesky link).
Nuke it from orbit?
Excellent plan.
We looked at buying a house that had a similar oil spill. The entire interior of the house had been repainted and refinished. The fuel smell hit you as you walked in the door.
We didn’t buy it.
My brother once bought a house that had been struck by lightning and suffered an attic fire a few years previously. Apparently no great damage to roof or structure, but there was extensive smoke and water damage. The then-owners had the house professionally remediated and redecorated with fresh paint & flooring, etc. And of course when they sold and moved out, all their possessions went with them.
I visited my bro after he and wife had lived there with their possessions for about 6 months. Even standing outside the front door it smelled like somebody in the neighborhood had a nice real wood fireplace fire going. The smell was even stronger inside. It was as if you were standing adjacent to a campfire. Pleasant and sorta homey for about a minute. Then irritating. Made you wonder how many noxious plastics and other chemicals were mixed in with the wood smoke aroma. More than zero I bet.
He paid about 2/3 of what a neighboring house would’ve sold for. I’m not sure he got a bargain. It later proved to be a very slow seller that went for a very low price when they moved on.
I expect when the fire happened the then-owners were relieved at first that their house wasn’t completely destroyed. I bet a year later they had changed their mind about that.
That sounds awful!
I would have thought an extensive rebuild after a fire would remove the odour but I guess not. Probably depends on the building materials and extent of replacement too.
We got rid of our heating oil in our house the year we bought it. The house had an electric furnace as well as oil and a hybrid heating system which did save money, but the tank needed replacement, the furnace was kind of leaky (at least for smells; we didn’t have it inspected since we ripped it out so quickly), and since I got pregnant that year I also puked every time the damn oil system heated up. I strongly associate the smell of heating oil with nausea!
Working at the airport didn’t help that year…when one neighbouring company would do engine runs I had to run to the bathroom to throw up too….!
This mitigation just was not completed properly. A decision is made early in the process whether to tear down or rebuild. Rebuilding after a fire sometimes means tearing right down to salvaged framing, reframing the roof and affected portions, soda blasting and smoke sealing the rest and then proceeding with all new electrical plumbing and HVAC.
You can’t leave anything that you can’t fully seal. A little hidden piece of insulation will screw the whole thing up.
Must also depend on either the length of time or something about modern building materials and/or house contents.
My house survived a fire early in its life. When I got here, you could still see the scorch marks in the attic. (You probably still could, but they’re covered over.) There was no smell, though.
However — the house was built in 1894. I got here in 1987. Not sure what year the fire was, but pretty sure it was before 1920 and I think it was earlier.
I’ve owned 3 houses in MA that had oil heat, 2 four bedroom and 1 three bedroom, and all had the standard 275 gallon tank. That’s all you really need for a suburban house, the only people I know with bigger or multiple tanks live way out in the woods and can’t depend on getting deliveries reliably if it’s a snowy winter. Medford is like 3 miles from Boston, there’s no reason to have higher capacity.
An oil tank actually has 2 pipes to the outside - a fill pipe and a vent pipe. The vent pipe both replaces air as the oil is used and lets air escape when the tank is being filled. Since the driver doesn’t know how much oil is currently in the tank when he arrives, watching a meter to tell when it’s full won’t work. Instead, there’s a whistle installed in the vent pipe in the tank a few inches from the top of the tank. As air escapes the tank, the whistle blows. When the oil reaches the whistle, it stops, and the driver shuts off the oil. So the driver should have noticed the vent pipe wasn’t whistling at all. I don’t know why the Fire chief in the article said the whistle starts when the tank gets full, that’s the exact opposite of what I’ve been told (and several websites say). And the pumps are fast, it takes less than 5 minutes to fill a tank. The driver stays at the pipe during the fill so he can’t see the meter on the truck either.
And yes, removing an oil tank has to be done by a licensed professional, and is absolutely not a DIY job. The contractor who removed the tank totally screwed them when he didn’t remove or block the oil pipe on the outside.
Here’s a video showing how the tank is filled. The whistle starts as soon as they open the valve and start pumping oil. So the driver did screw up, and the Fire chief apparently doesn’t know how oil tanks work.
A point of mitigation - those fuckers pump fast. It’s not like he stood there for a half an hour before he figured it out. It was probably closer to five minutes, if that.
Yeah, the video referenced above by muldoonthief stated 1 gallon per second. Which is damn fast.
385 gallons of oil would have taken 385 seconds, or 6 minutes and 41 seconds.
Sounds like somebody was playing on their phone or walked away to smoke something. Either way they totally lost track of time. Or simply didn’t care.
Or thought these folks had a truly huge tank that was near empty. I wonder what the tankage situation is at the house they should have delivered to, and what info, if any, the driver has about any particular delivery? Or is it just “Drive to this list of addresses and fill each tank until the whistle stops”?
The address he was supposed to go to was in Malden, another densely populated town that’s right next to Medford. There’s no reason to have anything more than a 275 gallon tank there either.
IME the oil companies schedule deliveries based on your historical oil usage and the average temp since your last fill - they want to refill your tank when you get to about 1/4 full. That way you theoretically never run out of oil (which utterly sucks) and they have a steadier revenue stream. Or you can always call for a fill if you noticed your tank is getting low - there’s a little float gauge on top of the tank.
And yes, I’m pretty sure it’s that - the driver can’t see the meter while he’s filling the tank - the fill pipe access can be on the side or the back of the house -Drive up, reset the meter to zero, drag the hose to the fill pipe, fill it until the whistle stops, reel the hose back, and print a receipt and leave it in the door for the customer.
And I’m assuming the incredibly precise amount of oil mentioned in the new stories is because the fire dept read it right off the truck meter when they came out.
Too late to edit: In the normal case, if the driver followed the procedure followed by the guy in the video I linked, there would have been less than a gallon of oil in the house - still a giant pain in the ass for the homeowner but not the DEP emergency this turned out to be.
Regardless, there’s several layers of incompetence here - removing a tank requires a permit and post-inspection by the building or fire department, someone should have noticed that the fill pipe wasn’t removed or sealed.
I just rewatched the beginning of the video I linked, and that company uses a computer with navigation to show them the route to the house, as well as listing the color & size of the house, etc. And that’s a small company that only serves 20ish towns in MA & RI. I’d be shocked if Fawcett (the company in question) doesn’t have the same thing, they are one of the larger oil companies and serve all of Eastern MA. Just the efficiency in planning the route would make the computers worth it.