The UST/Brownfields Universe

Approximately 440,000 active or abandoned and inactive sites have been affected by petroleum releases.

In the United States, the known brownfields universe of 500,000 sites includes nearly 200,000 abandoned gas stations and other vacant sites with petroleum contamination. For example, New Hampshire officials estimate that 70% of the state's brownfields have a petroleum component. An Illinois EPA survey of the state's municipalities identified gas stations as the most prevalent type of abandoned property. Often these abandoned properties occupy prominent real estate adjacent to residences on high-traffic transportation corridors (Northeast Midwest Institute [NWI] 2002).

As of September 2007, there were approximately 630,000 active USTs in the United States, and 474,127 releases have been confirmed. Of the 446,940 cleanups that have been initiated, 81,579 have not yet been completed (EPA 2007).

Brownfields and USTs are two of the six EPA Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response (OSWER) programs that address contaminated land. In October 2006, OSWER issued Interim Guidance to help track the success of land revitalization at the national level (EPA 2006). The measures used to track land revitalization include:

Universe Indicator—the total number of sites and acres being addressed by all of OSWER’s cleanup programs.
Protective for People (PFP) Performance Measure—the number of acres at which there is no complete pathway for human exposures to unacceptable levels of contamination based on current site conditions.
Ready for Anticipated Uses (RAU) Performance Measure—the number of acres at which:

Cleanup goals have been achieved for media that may affect current as well as reasonably expected future land uses, and
Institutional controls identified as part of the remedy are in place (EPA 2007b). For the Office of Underground Storage Tanks (OUST), at the end of FY 2006, 14,493 cleanups were completed, meaning that an equal number of acres are considered PFP.