The Non-Financial Ledger: What This Looks Like From the Shore

The Swinomish Channel is not an abstract legal concept. It is tidal water that the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community has fished, harvested, and depended on for generations. It connects to Padilla Bay, which connects to Puget Sound, which is one of the largest and most ecologically complex estuaries in the United States. Every rule in the federal oil spill prevention code that Venoil, LLC ignored was written because that water, and the life in it, can be destroyed by a single catastrophic spill from a facility exactly like Venoil’s.

What does it feel like to be the person who lives downstream from a bulk used-oil facility that has corroded tanks, no formal integrity inspection records, and a spill reporting form with no field for “how much oil actually entered the water”? You don’t know the risk exists. That’s the point. The entire architecture of federal spill prevention law exists precisely because private companies cannot be trusted to voluntarily maintain the systems that protect shared public resources. When those systems are not maintained, the public absorbs the risk. The company absorbs the profit.

The tanks at this facility are not hypothetical. Tanks T3, T4, and T5 were built somewhere else, moved to this site, and placed into service holding bulk oil, adjacent to a drainage ditch that runs directly to navigable waters. No one evaluated whether moving those tanks cracked their metal or compromised their welds in ways that would make them vulnerable to sudden failure. No one documented a timeline for when they would be formally inspected for the first time. At the time of the 2022 EPA inspection, there were no records of formal integrity testing at all.

The people who work at facilities like this deserve better too. An oil storage worker who notices a leak is supposed to have written procedures telling them exactly what to do and who to call. Venoil’s plan told workers they had up to two hours before they had to notify the National Response Center, a direct misstatement of federal law. A worker following that guidance in good faith would unknowingly be allowing a discharge to spread for hours before any emergency response was triggered.

The price of nine years of deferred compliance was $57,800. Puget Sound cannot be rebuilt for $57,800. The herring, Dungeness crab, Chinook salmon, and harbor seals that depend on Padilla Bay do not negotiate consent agreements.

Legal Receipts: What the Documents Actually Say

These are verbatim passages from EPA Docket No. CWA-10-2024-0048. Read them in the company’s own regulatory context.

“At the time of the 2022 Inspection, the Facility did not provide any records of formal integrity testing and inspection, in violation of 40 C.F.R. § 112.8(c)(6).”

— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 3.28

• This is the clearest single line in the entire document. Venoil’s plan claimed to conform to API 653, an industry standard requiring at minimum monthly in-service tank inspections. When the EPA showed up, there was no documentation that a single formal integrity test had ever been conducted on any tank at this facility.
• The absence of records is not merely a paperwork problem. It means there is no verifiable basis for concluding that the tanks holding bulk used oil at this facility were structurally sound at any point before or during the inspection.

“Respondent was storing bulk oil in multiple tanks with significant paint chipping and cracking, metal corrosion, and de-lamination of metal on the sides, which is a violation of 40 C.F.R. § 112.8(c)(1).”

— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 3.61

• Federal law requires that bulk storage containers be materially compatible with what they store. Tanks with active metal corrosion and de-laminating surfaces are, by definition, not in compatible condition for bulk oil storage.
• This was visible to an EPA inspector on a single site visit. It was not a hidden defect requiring sophisticated testing to discover. The corrosion was apparent enough to be documented as a standalone violation.

“The 2022 SPCC Plan, Section 1.4.3, defines ‘immediately’ as, ‘as soon as a person is available to call the National Response Center without further endangering human life or environment; but in no event no longer than two hours after the release has taken place.’ Respondent violated 40 C.F.R. § 112.7(a)(4) by incorrectly identifying two hours as the time period during which notification can occur.”

— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 3.48

• Federal law requires immediate notification of the National Response Center upon knowledge of any discharge of oil. Venoil wrote into its own plan that two hours was acceptable. That is a direct misstatement of the legal standard.
• In a real spill scenario, two hours is the difference between an emergency response that contains the discharge before it reaches the drainage ditch and a spill that has been flowing toward Padilla Bay for 120 minutes before anyone with authority to respond is even notified.

“The 2022 SPCC Plan, Section 1.4.3, states that ‘[r]eportable quantities for oil and petroleum products typically found at this facility would be 42 gallons.’ 40 C.F.R. § 110.6 requires notification for any reportable discharge of oil. Reportable discharges include oil discharges that, regardless of volume, cause either: (1) a violation of applicable water quality standards; or (2) a film, sheen upon, or discoloration of the surface of the water or adjoining shorelines; or (3) a sludge or emulsion to be deposited beneath the surface of the water or upon adjoining shorelines.”

— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 3.49

• Venoil told its employees that only spills of 42 gallons or more needed to be reported. The actual federal standard has no volume threshold when visible contamination of water is involved. A sheen on the surface of the Swinomish Channel triggers mandatory reporting whether it comes from 1 gallon or 1,000.
• This error is not a technicality. It means that under Venoil’s own internal guidance, an employee who watched oil form a visible film on the drainage ditch would have had no instruction to call the National Response Center, because the volume would likely appear to be under 42 gallons.

“The Facility does not have any documentation that it has conducted any five-year reviews of the 2013 SPCC Plan. EPA conducted an inspection in 2018 and subsequently provided Respondent with a list of plan deficiencies which should have resulted in Respondent updating its SPCC Plan.”
— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 3.36

“The 2013 and 2022 SPCC Plans failed to address the brittle fracture provision for three tanks (T3, T4, and T5), which were field-erected and constructed at another location and then purchased and transported to the Facility.”

— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 3.57

• Brittle fracture is a catastrophic failure mode: a tank under stress can crack suddenly and completely rather than leaking slowly. Federal law specifically requires evaluation of this risk when a field-constructed tank is moved, altered, or put into new service, because the act of transporting a large welded steel structure can introduce stresses and micro-fractures that compromise its integrity.
• Venoil acquired three such tanks, moved them to its Anacortes site, filled them with bulk oil adjacent to navigable waters, and neither plan prepared over nine years addressed this risk at all.

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Pays When Regulations Are Theater

Environmental Degradation

The facility sits at a chokepoint where any oil discharge flows directly through a connected chain of protected and commercially vital waterways.

• A drainage ditch on the facility’s northern boundary drains into road ditches that run east to the Swinomish Channel and Padilla Bay. Padilla Bay is a tidal bay of Puget Sound, connected to the Pacific Ocean via the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Any discharge from this facility’s storage area that reaches that ditch does not stop until it reaches open water.
• Padilla Bay is one of the largest remaining estuaries in Washington State and supports critical eelgrass habitat. Eelgrass beds are nursery grounds for juvenile Dungeness crab, herring, and dozens of other species. Oil contamination of eelgrass is persistent and can eliminate entire beds, with recovery measured in decades.
• The Swinomish Channel is specifically identified in the consent agreement as both a tributary of Padilla Bay and a body of water used in interstate and foreign commerce. A catastrophic tank failure from one of the three relocated tanks (T3, T4, or T5), none of which underwent a brittle fracture evaluation, could discharge a significant volume of bulk used oil into that channel before any containment response could be mounted.
• Venoil’s own spill plan failed to include a prediction of the direction, rate of flow, and total quantity of oil that each tank could discharge in a realistic failure scenario. There was no documented modeling of what a worst-case spill from this facility would look like, despite a federal requirement to produce exactly that analysis.
• Mobile and portable oil containers at the facility had no documented secondary containment. There was no narrative in either the 2013 or 2022 plan describing how drums and totes stored in transfer areas would be kept from spilling into the drainage system in a failure event.

“The Swinomish Channel is tidal and was and is used in interstate and foreign commerce. Padilla Bay is a tidal bay of Puget Sound… connected to the Pacific Ocean via the Strait of Juan de Fuca.”
— Consent Agreement, Paragraph 3.20

Public Health

Used oil is not clean petroleum. It contains heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and other contaminants accumulated during its service life, and it carries specific risks when it enters the food chain through contaminated shellfish and fish.

• Puget Sound supports active commercial and tribal shellfish harvesting. Shellfish are filter feeders that concentrate contaminants from the water column. An oil discharge that reaches Padilla Bay and the Swinomish Channel would move directly into habitat used by harvestable shellfish populations, creating a public health pathway from the facility to the dinner table.
• Venoil’s plan defined a reportable spill as 42 gallons or more, incorrectly excluding any spill that produces a sheen, film, or discoloration of the water surface. Under that incorrect standard, small but persistent discharges (such as seepage from corroded tank walls) could occur without triggering any notification, allowing contamination to accumulate over time without any regulatory response.
• Workers at the facility were operating under a plan that told them they had two hours after discovering a discharge before they needed to call anyone. In a real emergency involving bulk used oil and proximity to a drainage channel, two hours of unreported discharge is a public health event, not merely a procedural delay.
• Neither the 2013 nor 2022 SPCC Plan included a discussion of conformance with Washington Department of Ecology’s waste oil and hazardous waste regulations, meaning the facility’s own plans did not acknowledge the full scope of the state-level health and environmental protections applicable to its operations.

Economic Inequality

The consequences of lax enforcement at facilities like Venoil’s fall hardest on communities that cannot absorb the cost of environmental remediation or a disrupted fishing economy.

• The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community holds treaty rights to fish and harvest shellfish in the Swinomish Channel and connected waters. A discharge from Venoil’s facility that contaminated those waters would not be an abstract environmental harm: it would be a direct violation of treaty-protected economic and cultural rights that the federal government is legally obligated to uphold.
• Commercial and recreational fishing in Puget Sound generates hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity annually. A significant oil spill that triggered a shellfish closure or fishing moratorium in Padilla Bay would impose immediate, concrete economic losses on small-scale fishers, tribal harvesters, and waterfront businesses, none of whom had any input into Venoil’s decision to defer required inspections for nine years.
• Remediation of a major oil spill in a tidal estuary is extraordinarily expensive. If Venoil’s tanks had failed catastrophically before the 2022 inspection, the cost of cleanup would fall on public funds, federal emergency response accounts, and the affected communities, not on the $57,800 penalty that the company ultimately paid for years of non-compliance.
• Small operators and individual contractors in the same industry are subject to the same SPCC regulations. Venoil’s ability to operate out of compliance for years without consequence creates an uneven playing field where the cost of compliance (inspections, certified PE reviews, updated plans) falls on companies that actually follow the rules, while non-compliant operators pocket the savings until, or unless, an inspector shows up.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

The EPA calculated that the maximum allowable penalty for these violations, under inflation-adjusted law, is $288,080. The settled penalty is $57,800. Here is what that number means in context.

What Now? Who Is Responsible and What You Can Do

The consent agreement names the parties. The accountability trail is clear. The question is whether that accountability extends beyond a $57,800 check.

Who Signed This Agreement

• Scott Briggs, Manager, Venoil, LLC signed the consent agreement on behalf of the respondent, certifying that as of his signature date, Venoil had corrected the violations alleged in Part III.
• Edward J. Kowalski, Director, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, EPA Region 10 signed on behalf of the complainant, EPA.
• Richard Mednick, Regional Judicial Officer, EPA Region 10 issued the Final Order, making the agreement legally binding as of July 25, 2024.

Regulatory Watchlist

These are the agencies with ongoing jurisdiction over this facility and the waterways it threatens:

• EPA Region 10 (Seattle): Primary federal enforcer of the Clean Water Act Section 311(b)(6) and 40 C.F.R. Part 112 SPCC regulations. Responsible for ongoing inspection and compliance verification at Venoil’s Anacortes facility. Contact: 1200 Sixth Avenue, Suite 155, Seattle, WA 98101.
• Washington Department of Ecology: State-level authority over waste oil and hazardous waste regulations that Venoil’s own SPCC Plan failed to address. Violation 13 in this case is a direct failure to account for Washington Ecology’s rules. Ecology’s Southwest and Northwest Regional Offices both have enforcement jurisdiction over facilities in Skagit County.
• National Response Center (NRC): The federally mandated point of contact for immediate oil spill reporting. Call 1-800-424-8802 to report an observed oil discharge in navigable waters. This is the number Venoil’s plan misidentified the reporting timeline for.
• Swinomish Indian Tribal Community: A sovereign tribal nation with treaty rights to fish and harvest shellfish in the Swinomish Channel and connected waters. Their environmental department has standing to engage with federal and state regulators regarding threats to treaty-protected resources from facilities like this one.

What You Can Do

• Request the inspection records: Submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to EPA Region 10 for all inspection records, deficiency notices, and communications related to Venoil, LLC (Docket CWA-10-2024-0048 and the 2018 inspection). FOIA requests can be filed at foia.epa.gov. Inspection documents that become public create accountability that consent agreements alone do not.
• Contact your elected representatives: U.S. Senators and Representatives from Washington State sit on committees with oversight authority over EPA enforcement funding and priorities. Constituent pressure for adequate inspection budgets and stronger penalty structures is one of the few levers available to the public in these cases.
• Support tribal environmental advocacy: The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, Coast Salish peoples, and other treaty tribes in the Puget Sound region are among the most effective and motivated environmental advocates for these waterways. Their legal standing, combined with treaty rights, gives them tools that individual citizens do not have. Find and support their environmental programs directly.
• Support local environmental organizations: Puget Soundkeeper Alliance and similar groups conduct independent water quality monitoring in the Puget Sound watershed. Independent monitoring creates data that EPA enforcement cannot depend on federal budget cycles to provide.
• Document and report: If you observe oil sheen, discoloration, or a visible spill on or near the Swinomish Channel, Padilla Bay, or any connected waterway, call the National Response Center immediately at 1-800-424-8802. Citizen reporting is a direct counterweight to the two-hour delay that Venoil’s own plan was built around.