The Power of Words. Willie's Nightmare

3/2/97
WILLIE'S NIGHTMARE: Day of Reckoning
This is the story of the price one man paid for an environmental accident -- a gasoline leak that threatened the drinking water of 20,000 homes.

By BOB WYSS
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Related story: 3/4/98: IRS renews 'Willie's Nightmare'

DAY ONE - March 2, 1997
       The call came early in the afternoon of Christmas Eve.
       William J. DeCesare took it in the office of the gas station. It was a hectic day. Willie was finished in the garage bays - hardly anyone gets a car repaired the day before Christmas - but there was a steady stream of traffic at the pumps. He wiped his hands on a rag and lifted the receiver of the black, rotary dial telephone.
       It was a reporter. Did Willie know that the state had found a gasoline leak under his service station? Did he know it was threatening the wells of three public water companies? What was he going to do about it?
       The calendar over Willie's shoulder said December 1993. He looked out the windows, beyond the Texaco sign, to the traffic on Post Road.
       Willie was dumbfounded.
       No one from the state had told him of a leak. Two years before he had installed an alarm system to detect any gasoline runoff from the tanks or the pumps. It had never sounded, he told the reporter.
       As quickly as possible, he got off the phone.
       This was trouble. But it was tough to gauge at first.
       Willie DeCesare is much better at listening to the hum of an engine and finding the pinprick in a vacuum line that is causing the carburetor to breathe too deeply.
       What he knows best is cars. There have been DeCesares fixing automobles in East Greenwich since the 1920s. Willie's father was the first. Then Willie opened this station. Now, his youngest son, Michael, works with him. Customers know Willie is not a great talker, especially when he is puzzling over a brake job, but they know they can trust him.
       From the call, Willie guessed that this must have something to do with the test wells that he recently installed. The state Department of Environmental Management had insisted on them, after he had replaced some pipes between the pumps and the tanks without official permission.
       A DEM notice about the leak was at home that night.
       He tried not to think about it over Christmas. He and Madeline, his wife, had the family over to their duplex in West Warwick. All three children, their spouses, and the nine grandchildren came. Still, the DEM notice came up at the dinner table. It was enough to sour Willie's stomach. Madeline looked worried too.
       Two days after Christmas Willie and Madeline met with their lawyer, Ralph Kinder. It was late afternoon and they were in one of the station's bays, where the stale odor of old grease lingers in the air. Kinder brought along an expert in cleaning up spills, Gary Ezovski, who owns the engineering firm Lincoln Environmental.
       Ezovski often works for DEM; they had already talked to him. He knew the extent of Willie's troubles. He was not looking forward to this conversation.
       From an environmental and health standpoint, the station couldn't be in a worse location.
       It's atop a key spot in the Hunt River aquifer, where sand and gravel deposited from the last ice age collect and hold water. Five wells have been bored in distances from 400 feet to 1,300 feet of the station. They supply water to more than 20,000 people and 100 businesses, including some of the state's biggest firms, among them Electric Boat.
       Ezovski told Willie and Madeline that the officials of the affected water agencies - Kent County Water Authority, the Town of North Kingstown, and the state Economic Development Corporation - were alarmed about the spill. They had already shut down their wells in fear that the gasoline would move rapidly through the sand and poison the drinking water.
       They would want answers soon about where the spill was going.
       DEM's official Immediate Compliance Order was demanding that Willie install a hydraulic pump to contain the spilled gasoline in the groundwater. It had to be installed within 15 days. If he refused, he faced a $25,000 fine.
       Ezovski warned that DEM would want Willie to clean up the spill. He would have to hire an engineer, bore new test wells and take lab tests to gauge the extent of the problem. He would have to prepare a plan, buy more cleanup equipment, and pay to run it. It could cost tens of thousands of dollars.
       Or more.
       It was impossible to predict.
       "It's like stepping into a pitch dark hallway," Ezovski likes to say, "and not knowing when the door is going to come."
       It was cold in the bay and getting dark.
       Madeline and Willie had been listening impassively. But inside, Willie was reeling.
       He was not a big corporation. He had no insurance for such a catastrophe. He and Madeline had worked all of their lives. Yes, they had savings: some cash, maybe $60,000, the duplex, a second they had inherited, and the gas station.
       How far could that go?
       Kinder had another suggestion. Rather than cooperate, they could fight the order. They could oppose every effort by the state to get on Willie's property or to clean up the spill. At the very least, this might buy Willie time to find some help in paying for the cleanup.
       Ultimately, there would be a bill. If Willie lost the fight, the state would do the work and then would come after Willie and Madeline to pay for it.
       "This is everyone's environmental nightmare," said Kinder.
       The decision was Willie and Madeline's. And they had to make it immediately.

DAY TWO - March 3, 1997
       A sheet of ice coated Rhode Island. Dawn was breaking, and pelting sleet was slipping into freezing rain. Planes were avoiding T.F. Green Airport, an emergency shelter in Wickford was helping residents who had lost their electricity and Route 95 was a slick and empty ribbon of ice.
       Yet a frenzy of activity was under way on this Saturday morning in January 1994 at the gas station owned by Willie and Madeline DeCesare.
       Workers were scurrying to install a hydraulic containment system at the station on Post Road in East Greenwich. It was designed to contain a gasoline spill that had seeped into the groundwater and was threatening five nearby public drinking wells.
       Just two weeks before, Willie and Madeline had stood in one of the bays of the garage listening to their lawyer and two engineers offer them choices. They could pay tens of thousands of dollars - maybe more - to begin cleaning up the spill. Or they could aggressively fight the state and at the very least delay the cleanup.
       After the experts finished huddling with Willie and Madeline, the couple stepped aside to discuss their options.
       This was not an easy decision. They were working people with limited assets. Willie had run this gas station for a quarter-century. Their life savings was at stake. There was no assurance they could ever recover it.
       But Willie knew in his heart what he had to do.
       "You put 25 years of your life into this place, and you just can't walk away," Willie explained later. "This is my property and I'm not walking away from it."
       Not everyone in the oil industry has been as responsible.
       Oil companies have been at the center of some of the biggest environmental disasters. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill inspired the first Earth Day; the Valdez spill in 1989 horrified the nation; and Rhode Islanders got their share of calamity last year when a fuel oil barge ran aground off Moonstone Beach.
       But those were accidents.
       Less noticeable but more insidious have been the oil industry's deliberate pollution of the environment.
       Consider the Mobil Oil Co. refinery and tank farm in East Providence erected in the 1920s. Environmental engineers a few years ago found evidence of countless leaks stretching back for decades. Few were ever cleaned up. They cited dozens of areas where the groundwater was contaminated or the soil saturated with oil; old barrels of oil were found buried in the ground; and they viewed asphalt lakes as large as 400 feet across and 6 feet deep.
       By the 1980s the public had had enough and tough laws and regulations were established. Federal studies found that nationally 30,000 underground storage tanks leak each year.
       Today there are strict requirements about how the gasoline we rely on for our cars must be stored. But of the more than 300,000 underground tank leaks that have been found since 1984, less than half of those spills have been cleaned up.
       In Rhode Island, where about 130 spills occur each year, Willie's was suddenly the state's highest priority.
       Willie was overwhelmed by the activity that swept over the station during the last days of 1993 and the first of 1994. It began with the deliveries of machinery, barrels, a drilling rig, a prefabricated steel shed. Then came the laborers, the engineers, the DEM inspectors. Sometimes up to 20 people would be on site.
       The five public water wells had been turned off while a new pump was installed at Willie's to contain the movement of the spill.
       Willie had 15 days to get the pump installed.
       But no one had counted on the three snow storms, that dumped nearly a foot and a half of snow, during those 15 days.
       But they made it. The pump was running by the state's deadline, two days after the January ice storm.
       Motorists became used to the gray sheet-metal shed in front of gasoline pumps.
       Willie did not get used to the bills.
       The first month the tab came to $60,000. That wiped out what cash he and Madeline had saved over 26 years of marriage. Then he mortgaged the two duplexes that had been in the DeCesare family since 1903. It was impossible to get a loan for the station because it no longer had a positive value.
       The bills poured in each month: $25,000; $20,000; $27,000.
       Willie and Madeline paid for operating the hydraulic pump, for drilling more test wells, for the laboratory tests.
       Willie and his son, Michael, who first began coming to the station 22 years ago when he was 10 and who is now a full-time partner, tried to cut costs. Inside the shed six 55-gallon drums - each of which cost $500 - were removing the gasoline from the water. At least one or two a week had to be replaced. To save money, Willie and Michael did that work. The barrels were soaked and each weighed more than 300 pounds.
       Madeline seemed to worry the most. As the bookkeeper, she tracked and paid the bills.
       Sometimes it felt as if they were pushing against the tide. Sometimes Willie got down.
       Especially when he thought about the source of the spill. Even though he was losing his life savings in cleaning it up, he knew he was not responsible for it. Someone else was and he could prove it.

DAY THREE - March 4, 1997
       William J. DeCesare held the 13-foot-long wooden measuring stick that looks like a long skinny child's ruler. He plunged it into the tank, sliding it down until the stick's plastic tip tapped bottom. He paused, and then yanked it back up.
       He checked the mark showing the level of gasoline in the tank, and then looked at it again. It was lower then it should be. The three other tanks at the station on Post Road in East Greenwich seemed fine.
       Puzzled, Willie waited a few hours and then used the stick to check the tank again. This time the level in the 2,000 gallon steel tank was even lower. When he examined his gasoline inventory records he realized that 940 gallons of Plus grade gas were missing - there had to be a leak in the system.
       He reported what he'd found. The next day engineers came out and confirmed Willie's suspicion. He transferred what was left of the Plus grade gasoline into the Regular grade tank. Later, the empty tank was filled with sand.
       And that was the end of it. No one worried that 940 gallons of gasoline had leaked into the ground. None of the five public drinking wells, located within 1,300 feet of the spill, were closed. No one began monitoring the spill, let alone cleaning it up.
       No one worried because the spill was found on New Year's Day, 1973.
       It took 20 years for the state to discover that gasoline under the station. By then the laws had changed drastically requiring a cleanup to begin immediately. Willie and his wife, Madeline, had to mortgage their home and a second duplex they owned to finance the cleanup.
       Why were they paying? After all, Willie was only the manager when the spill occurred. He found it, and reported it to the owners, Exxon, currently the third richest corporation on the Fortune 500 with an annual income of $110 billion. It was the oil company, not Willie, who had decided to ignore the spill.
       Willie had taken over the lease of the station in 1970, when Exxon was still being called the Esso Oil Co. He had just lost his job as a mechanic for Arnold Garage in his hometown of West Warwick. The station was on Post Road, just north of Frenchtown Road and down the slope from the Hilltop Drive-In, which that summer was packing in families to watch 101 Dalmations and The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit.
       He worked hard those first few years, opening the station by 7 and sometimes not getting home until 8 or 9 at night. Vacations consisted of finding a cabin for the family down at the beach, with Willie commuting.
       No one noticed or complained after the spill was found in 1973.
       No one in East Greenwich, North Kingstown, Warwick, or West Warwick reported smelling gasoline when they drank a glass or cleaned their clothes with tapwater from any of the five wells near the station.
       There was no other way to know if gasoline had seeped all the way to the wells because the water companies only tested for bacterial contamination. It would not be until 1988 that they would begin to test for known and potential carcinogens and toxins that are found in gasoline. Residents who depend upon one of the hundreds of smaller water authorities, or private drinking wells, still do not have that protection.
       Willie gave no thought to the spill in 1983 when Exxon proposed selling him the station.
       The offer was like a dream come true. Willie had wondered for years if he would ever be his own boss. The oil company charged rent for everything, even the big Exxon sign out front, lighted with electricity Willie paid for.
       In buying the station for $93,750, Willie and Madeline DeCesare agreed to assume all liability for the station and its operation. Willie knew gasoline had leaked out of a tank under the station. But that was a long time ago and he wasn't worried about it.
       Others did.
       It was a changing time for the gasoline industry. Large oil companies were in the processs of selling off small gas stations and closing others.
       The government was getting tough on preventing spills from underground tanks at gasoline stations.
       After the purchase, business grew. Willie's youngest son, Michael, had joined him in the bays of the garage in 1992. It took 10 years, but by late 1993 Willie and Madeline had paid off the station's mortgage. He began talking about working fewer hours, perhaps turning over more of the duties to Mike.
       Then he received a call on Christmas Eve telling him that a spill had been found.
       A few weeks later Ralph Kinder, Willie's lawyer, wrote to Exxon inviting them to open substantive discussions to help pay for the cleanup and reimburse Willie and Madeline.
       Six months later, Willie was still waiting to hear from Exxon. By then Willie and Madeline DeCesare has spent more than $200,000 of their life savings to clean up the spill.
       Kinder did get a call in June from the engineer Willie had hired to supervise the cleanup. Gary Ezovski called to say the latest laboratory tests had come in and they were upsetting. They were so bad, he wanted Willie and Kinder to meet with DEM as quickly as possible.

DAY FOUR - March 5, 1997
       William J. DeCesare was losing control of his world.
       On Christmas Eve 1993, he was officially notified that a gasoline spill had been found under his service station in East Greenwich. Now, six months later, he was sitting in an office of a squat Providence tenement just down the street from the imposing white marble dome of the State House. It was the headquarters of the state Department of Environmental Management. Willie, his lawyers and engineers, sat across a long conference table from DEM's lawyers and engineers.
       They had bad news.
       Five public drinking wells that are within 1,300 feet of Willie's station, kept off-line because of the emergency, had recently been turned back on. The water agencies, the Kent County Water Authority, the Town of North Kingstown and the state Economic Development Corporation, said the water was needed with summer coming.
       Although test wells had shown that the spill was not reaching the drinking water, new data was showing that groundwater in the test wells had dropped 10 feet, reported Gary Ezovski of Lincoln Environmental, the engineering firm managing the cleanup for Willie.
       Ten feet, says Ezovski, "is a very large change in elevation. What we usually see is a change of a few inches."        Turning on the drinking wells had created an underground suction which made the groundwater fall.
       Terrence Gray, who ran DEM's waste cleanup efforts, was not surprised. Everyone had been crossing their fingers for months, hoping this would not happen. The results showed that the cleanup effort currently under way would have to be expanded.
       Ezovski gave Gray and Brian Wagner, a DEM lawyer assigned to the case, a new, revised budget. New pumps would be needed to control the direction of the spill. They would cost $130,000. Another $6,000 would be needed each month to keep them running.
       Ralph Kinder, the lawyer for Willie and Madeline, reported that his clients had already mortgaged their home and a second duplex. Now that money, plus their savings - more than $200,000 total - was gone.
       Gray had anticipated this. He said the state had federal money for such emergencies. It would be used.
       The issue of Exxon's liability was raised.
       Exxon had owned the station in 1972-73 when a spill occurred. Laboratory tests indicated that some of the gasoline in the ground dated back to that time.
       But Exxon had sold the Post Road station in 1983 to Willie and Madeline and they had bought it under the same terms as buying a used car, "as is." Plus, there were no specific laws in the 1970s ordering the party responsible for a gasoline spill to clean it up. In fact, there had not even been a DEM at that time.
       Both Kinder, representing Willie, and Wagner, representing DEM, had written to Exxon. Clearly Exxon, ranked third in the Fortune 500 with annual revenues of $110 billion, had the resources to pay for this cleanup.
       While the prospects of forcing them to pay were remote, there were some opportunities in the law.
       One was to use the state's Nuisance law. Legal scholars say nuisance law, which dates to 13th century England, is an impenetrable jungle of conflicting definitions. Yet the Attorney General has used the law in Rhode Island to define threats to the environment and to force cleanups.
       A second was the Public Drinking Water Act, which forbids anyone to threaten or contaminate a source of drinking water. Both the law and the Department of Health, which enforces it, had been around in the 1970s.
       During the summer Wagner, representing DEM, approached the Attorney General and the Health Department to ask them to take up the case against Exxon.
       Both said no. They gave various reasons: the records were old; the spill was no longer a threat to drinking water; they had limited resources.
       DEM was back on its own, now with far fewer resources to strike a bargain. It was not until February 1995 that the lawyers and engineers for DEM and Exxon met for the first time.
       At the gas station, Willie was increasingly exasperated. As long as he was paying the bills, he could work to control costs. Now, with the state in charge, he watched prices mount at an alarming rate.
       More than once, DEM warned that they might sue him to recover their costs. At least two of the water companies had sent similar letters.
       There was pressure on both Willie and Madeline. "It worked on her," says their son, Michael. "Maybe it was because there was nothing she could do to control it."
       One Sunday night in March 1995, Willie and Madeline were just settling into sleep in their West Warwick duplex on a ridge above the Pawtuxet River.
       Madeline nudged Willie.
       "I've never felt like this before," she said.
       Suddenly feverish, she asked for a towel but by the time Willie was back, she was worse. By the time he called 911 she had slid out of the bed.
       Willie is convinced she was gone by the time the rescue squad took her from the house. The doctors pronounced her dead later that night.
       Now Willie DeCesare felt he had lost control of his whole world.

DAY FIVE - March 6, 1997
       For years the land atop Prospect Hill has nurtured William J. DeCesare and his family.
       It was 1903 when his great-grandfather, Angelo DeCesare, recently come from Italy, bought the modest two-story cold water flat here in West Warwick's mill village of Natick. The two-acre plot produced red rich plum tomatoes and plump green peppers. Grapes hung in heavy, sweet bunches from the arbors, enough to produce five barrels of homemade wine after each year's harvest.
       As the family grew, two more houses were added. Willie was born and raised in the one at 14-16 Fiume St. Later he married the former Madeline Fox and they raised three children there.
       Willie and Madeline never had a mortgage on 14-16 Fiume St. - until three years ago.
       That was when DEM discovered a gasoline leak under their East Greenwich service station that threatened five nearby drinking wells. They mortgaged their home, along with a second one they had bought 15 years ago, the original family house that had been Angelo's.
       The amount of debt and savings spent is now approaching $300,000.
       But if the gas station were in Massachusetts, Connecticut, elsewhere in New England, or almost any other state in the nation, he would not be facing this dilemma.
       More than 40 states, including every New England state except Rhode Island, have established a fund to help small gasoline station owners pay the costs of cleaning up a leaking tank.
       The idea of establishing such a fund was discussed for years in Rhode Island.
       Twice, in 1992 and again in 1993, the General Assembly approved a bill establishing a fund which would pay up to $1 million to clean up leaking underground tanks.
       Twice then-Gov. Bruce G. Sundlun vetoed the legislation because lawmakers had not allocated money for the fund.
       Finally in July 1994, a bill was passed and signed by Sundlun. Since then motorists have been paying an extra penny for every gallon of gasoline for the fund, which is designed to pay up to $1 million to clean up each spill.
       The money is needed. The state Department of Environmental Management estimates that there are at least $18 million in claims.
       But not a single penny has been spent so far.
       First, Governor Almond and legislative leaders were slow to appoint members of the Underground Storage Tank Financial Responsibility Fund Review Board, charged with reviewing all claims. The board finally met for the first time in January 1996. Then they took more than a year to rewrite regulations already established by DEM.
       There should be more than $8 million in the fund, except that Almond and legislators have repeatedly drained the account to help balance the state budget.
       Vincent J. Mesolella Jr., who heads the board, says applications are being accepted and the first decisions on who will get the money will begin to be made in about two weeks. "We know that the amount of money going in is not enough to pay all the claims," says Mesolella. "The task is not to process the claims, but to reimburse claimants in an equitable way."
       Mesolella won the chairmanship because of his political wits. He is a North Providence legislator, high in the ranks of the House leadership, who has carved his political clout not through writing new laws but by running environmental agencies such as the Narragansett Bay Commission and now the Review Board. His power is such that even though he has not had an opponent in his legislative district since 1992, he was able to raise more than $60,000 in just a a 15 month period.
       Why should a politician head the review board?
       "I have a knack for getting things done," says Mesolella. "As a legislator I feel you have the opportunity to identify more closely with constituents," he added. "We have more of a sensitivity to local business people such as those who run a Mom and Pop gas station."
       Of the many claims Mesolella and the board will have to decide, one may come from Exxon.
       For more than two years lawyers for Exxon and DEM have been in talks about the giant oil company's responsibility in the cleanup at Willie's station. Exxon owned it when a leak occurred in 1972-73, but it transferred liability 10 years ago when it sold the station to Willie and Madeline DeCesare.
       Following an initial negotiating session in February 1995, DEM two months later wrote to Exxon proposing that the company pay to build and maintain a new unit to clean up the spill. The construction and maintenance costs for one year totaled $455,000.
       Exxon refused.
       But by spring 1996, the three affected water companies, Kent County Water Authority, the Town of North Kingstown, and the state Economic Development Corporation were upset by the lack of progress in building this new unit which would finally distill the gasoline from the groundwater. They complained in a letter to DEM and to the media.
       Three months later DEM struck a deal with Exxon. In exchange for a promise from DEM not to sue Exxon, the company agreed to provide the equipment for the cleanup and other costs. DEM says the total value was about $280,000.
       Last year Exxon was ranked third on the Fortune 500 with revenues of $110 billion. Even so, much of the $280,000 the company spent on the cleanup is eligible for reimbursement from the fund. The state also spent money to clean up the site - close to $500,000 - and it too is eligible for reimbursement from the fund.
       But Willie will get no relief from the fund.
       It will not help him pay off the mortgages on his houses on Prospect Hill. Though he spent nearly $300,000 on the cleanup, Willie figures he can only be reimbursed for about $40,000.
       The reason?
       Because of the delays in passing legislation, Willie spent most of his life savings before the law took effect July 8, 1994.

DAY 6 - March 7, 1997
       The eastern sky is just beginning to turn blue between the cracks in the black clouds when William J. DeCesare arrives at his gas station.
       It is 6:22 a.m.
       The hiss of machinery and pumps from the back of the lot is loud in this hour before dawn. The noise comes from the soil vapor extraction system, a device which cleans soil soaked by spilled gasoline.
       Willie does his early morning chores and by 6:45 he turns on the lights for the station on Post Road in East Greenwich. He's open for business.
       "This is the best part of the day," he tells a visitor as the first customer rolls to the pump.
       Sometimes customers notice that the gray metal shed that was installed in January 1994 near the pumps is gone. It housed machinery that worked to contain a gasoline spill the state discovered the month before. Customers ask if the cleanup is finished.
       Far from it.
       The shed was moved last summer from the front of the station, near the pumps, to the back of the station. It now houses the soil vapor extraction system which is cleaning tainted dirt. Across the street there are now two other, much larger sheds. One has a hydraulic containment system to prevent the gasoline plume from moving toward five nearby drinking wells. A second contains machinery which is removing gasoline from the groundwater.
       More than 20 wells have been drilled to monitor the spill.
       The cost to clean up the gasoline spill at Willie's station is now more than $1 million. Nearly one-third has been borne by Willie, who has drained his life savings and mortgaged his future at the age of 58.
       The fallout from the cleanup has been devastating, but Willie is trying to put some of the pieces of his life back together. He's been able to contain the drain of cash being spent. Now he would like to begin turning more of the work over to his youngest son, Michael. They've worked as a team now for 14 years pumping gas and fixing cars.
       But he can't do it.
       "I can't turn the burden over to him," says Willie shaking his head.
       The state says the cleanup is going to take at least two more years and another $100,000.
       Willie is sure he could clean it up for less than that.
       But where would he get the money?
       He could try Exxon, which owned the station when a spill occurred in 1972-73. His lawyer, Ralph Kinder, has tried to talk to Exxon, which is ranked third on the Fortune 500.
       "They're in a position where they are saying to me, 'Why should we talk to you?' " said Kinder. "We have very little leverage."
       After years of delay the state is about to begin dispersing money from a fund designed to help clean up spill's like Willie's. If Willie took over the project, future expenses would be reimbursed.
       That could solve the future but it won't resolve the past. What still eats at Willie is why so much work had to happen so fast to clean gasoline spilled into the ground in 1973.
       The spill threatened five public drinking wells and swift action was demanded. Yet all three water agencies today report that there is no evidence that gasoline has ever reached their drinking water.
       Sometimes Willie wonders if we're moving too fast, demanding too much, in cleaning the environment.
       "It's like going from being in the days of the Model T to overnight using state of the art technology," said Willie. "You can't clean up overnight what you have created in 50 years."
       Other critics agree. A study in California found that of 28,051 underground fuel tank spills, only 136 affected drinking water wells.
       But even Willie's defenders say there was really no choice in this case.
       Aquifers such as the Hunt River, where this spill occurred, have an unpredictable geology, says Gary Ezovski of Lincoln Environmental, the engineering firm Willie hired to run the cleanup. The underground terrain is "predictably unpredictable. Any scientific attempt to make a determination of where those compounds will go next is done at a great risk."
       The spill sure scared Tim Brown.
       Brown heads the Kent County Water Authority, which has a well that produces 2 million gallons of fresh water daily located only 600 feet from Willie's station. He says just the value of the water produced over one year equals three quarters of a million dollars.
       "And don't forget that aquifer is an infinite supply for the future," adds Brown. "In the winter it is only used as an off-peak supply but in the summer it's on almost constantly."
       What's even more frightening, says Brown, is that DEM only accidentally discovered the spill. How many more spills are there out there, waiting to be found?
       Not many, hopes Terrence Gray, who heads DEM's waste division. He says the state has worked hard to locate underground fuel tanks, especially in critical aquifers near water supplies. Laws require businesses to register and to periodically inspect tanks.
       Yet Willie can look up and down Post Road and remember where there used to be a gasoline station or a business that had an underground fuel tank. "I know places right here in town, where they had tanks in the ground and I bet they still have gas in them," he said.
       Could Willie's nightmare happen again, somewhere else in Rhode Island? Perhaps. It's tough to gauge how many hazards are out there. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one out of every eight parcels of nonresidential property in the nation is contaminated.
       Willie tries not to dwell on the past. It's easier to do what he knows best, fixing cars.
       But on this day that dawned dark and cloudy, business is slow in the garage bays. There are only five cars to fix. Three or four needed brake work; one needed a new headlight; and one needed an oil change. It's busier at the pumps, where full service at a price only 2 cents a gallon higher than the self-serve down the road usually brings a steady stream of business.
       During a lull, Willie tells a visitor he wants one thing made clear - he is not whining about what happened.
       "You do what you have to do," he says. "There is no point in complaining about it, about whining. Things had to be done, they were required, and I did them. I keep a lot of things inside me, that's just the way I am."
       It is 5:18 p.m. when Willie leaves the station. He has another hour of paperwork at home tonight.
       After Willie leaves, Post Road is busy and the noise of the traffic dominates. But when the cars have passed and the highway calms, there is another sound in the evening dusk. It is the hiss from the machinery at the back of the lot.

EPILOGUE - March 9, 1997
       Readers who called or wrote to the Journal-Bulletin this week in reaction to the six-part serial "Willie's Nightmare" were overwhelmingly sympathetic toward gasoline-station owner William J. DeCesare.
       The newspaper received 78 telephone messages and more than 10 computer E-mail messages in reaction to the series. The series reported that DeCesare has spent $300,000, his life's savings, toward cleaning up a gasoline spill that had occurred under his service station years before he took ownership.
       "I really feel sorry for Willie," said Paul Dupont, of Riverside, in a telephone call on Friday. "The guy did everything that's right. I think he's a very admirable man, to spend all his money. There's a lot of people that would have tried to sneak out of it."
       "I think Willie is getting a raw deal," said Luigi Abruzzese, of Hope Valley, in a telephone call on Tuesday. "Exxon should be paying for this spill because it happened when Exxon had the station."
       Readers were upset because Exxon owned the station, on Post Road in East Greenwich, when a leak occurred on Jan. 1, 1973. The leak was not cleaned up for more than a decade. DeCesare, who had managed the station since 1970, bought it in 1983. He became legally liable for the cleanup when the state Department of Environmental Management discovered gasoline in the ground water in December 1993.
       Both the state and Exxon have contributed money toward the cleanup, which has now cost more than $1 million, according to DEM. The state has spent about $500,000; Exxon, about $280,000.
       Many who responded argued that the state should have paid more. Some were outraged that the money the state raises for a cleanup fund through a penny-a- gallon gasoline tax has been drained to help balance the state budget.
       Even if the fund does begin to make reimbursements, DeCesare will be eligible for only about $40,000. The money may go to reimburse Exxon and the state itself.
       "It shows you how the government can kill the little guy," said Forrester Safford, of Charlestown, in a telephone call on Thursday.
       Many readers were particularly outraged that Exxon, a Fortune 500 company with an annual income of $110 billion, paid less than DeCesare.
       "The story . . . is a prime example of corporate irresponsibility and greed and legislative indifference," said Betsy Lincoln, of North Kingstown, in a telephone call on Thursday.
       The gasoline spill has been a major concern because it is located within 1,300 feet of five wells that supply water to 22,000 homes.
       "I don't believe Willie deserves the treatment he has been getting," said Louis Legris, of North Kingstown. "It's about time that somebody else helped him. I hope no one else gets in his situation."
       A few readers wondered what could be done financially to assist DeCesare.
       Although a few who called were critical of DEM, others said that DeCesare was responsible for the spill and should pay the price. One woman said the series was too slanted toward DeCesare and did not concentrate enough attention on the environmental and health threats posed by the spill.
       The unusual format for the series, spread out over six days in serial form with cliffhanger endings, drew both praise and scorn from readers.
       One reader said that "Willie's Nightmare" was the first story she read when she picked up the newspaper but that the writing was too spare. She wanted more details on incidents such as the death of DeCesare's wife, Madeline, which occurred in March 1995, and was reported in the Wednesday newspaper.
       There was also a strong positive response all week from customers driving up to the gasoline station, reported DeCesare.
       "They're saying that they are praying for me," he said. "They're saying they can't believe what happened."
       His son, Michael, who works with him at the station, said most customers thought that the cleanup efforts had finished long ago.
       DEM said that the cleanup will continue for at least two more years.

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