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Sandy’s Spoils Still Here in Old Saybrook

Three years after SuperStorm Sandy, a metal fuel tank with unknown contents still sits, rusting away, in the state-owned marsh abutting Ayers Point Road. Neighbor H. Wayne Carver II has written to state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) officials and received assurances they plan to remove it—but three years after the storm, there it sits still.

Carver has written to DEEP four times about a marooned wooden dock as well as the rusting tank.

In his most recent letter of April 6, Carver wrote, “Our good friend Sandy left us two large presents in the marsh directly in front of my house. Very close to shore is a section of floating dock, no longer floating...the second problem is further out, about halfway from shore to the edge of the river. It is a large tank similar in shape to those used for home fuel oil, but considerably larger. A good estimate is that it was a storage tank for a marine fueling station or the like.”

Since it floated away during the storm’s surge, Carver surmised it was air tight then. He believes that it probably floated down from a fueling station at a dock further up river. But with the exterior of the tank continuing to rust—and with no one yet having checked to see if it remains watertight—he once again recently wrote to DEEP to spur it to action.

Carver is concerned that, after more than three years sitting in the wet marsh water, what were once water-tight seams now could be leaking whatever was inside the tank, and that presents a pollution problem that he believes DEEP should address with haste.

DEEP’s written response to him in late April was, “Thank you for your email. I am forwarding your message to the Bureau of Water Protection and Land Reuse, Office of Long Island Sound, for a response.”

When contacted about the washed up items from Storm Sandy—and when they might be removed— DEEP spokesman Dennis Schain said, “We are aware of the two things in the marsh. We’ve discussed it with a contractor who has the equipment to—and will be scheduled to—remove it. And we [at DEEP] apologize that it’s taken us awhile to arrange for this [removal].”

Schain said that a DEEP contractor was scheduled to remove the two items left by Superstorm Sandy by the end of last week.