How Ocean Food and Fuels Played with Public Safety for Profit.

The Companies, the Tanks, and the Neighborhoods They Put at Risk

Four interconnected companies, all linked to the same individual, operated federally regulated underground storage tanks (USTs) across five gas station sites in South and Central New Jersey. Underground storage tanks hold gasoline and petroleum products directly beneath the ground, often just feet above the water table. When they leak, the contamination can spread silently for years before anyone notices it in the tap water.

The companies are Ocean Food and Fuels LLC, S&N Multani LLC, Multani & Sons LLC, and Latty & Amrita Petroleum Inc. All four are connected through a shared signatory: Satwinder S. Multani, who signed the consent agreement as president and whose contact email, smultani@satrajinc.com, ties all four entities to a single corporate address in Voorhees, New Jersey. This is one operator running multiple brands across multiple ZIP codes.

Here are the five facilities the EPA identified as the sites of the violations:

Several of these locations sit in the heart of New Jersey’s pinelands and coastal plain, areas where shallow aquifers provide drinking water to tens of thousands of residents. Dorchester and Dennis Township are deeply rural communities in Maurice River Township and Cape May County, respectively. These are places where a leaking tank is nobody’s problem until it becomes everybody’s problem.

Three Rules Broken, Five Sites, Two-Plus Years of Looking Away

They Skipped the Monthly Safety Checks

Federal law requires UST operators to physically walk through their facilities and inspect spill prevention equipment and release detection equipment every 30 days. These inspections exist for one reason: to catch leaks before they destroy groundwater. The EPA found that all five facilities failed to conduct these walkthroughs during various periods between August 2020 and February 2022.

That is potentially over a year and a half of underground fuel tanks operating without mandatory eyes on the safety equipment. No one was officially checking whether the leak detectors worked. No one was officially confirming spill containment was intact. These walkthroughs are the bare minimum, the lowest floor of safety compliance, and the companies skipped them.

They Couldn’t Prove Anyone Qualified Was Running the Equipment

Federal regulations require UST operators to maintain a current list of designated Class A, Class B, and Class C operators at every facility. These are the people trained to handle emergencies, monitor systems, and respond when something goes wrong underground. The EPA found that all five facilities failed to maintain these lists during various periods between July 2021 and August 2022.

Class A operators understand the regulatory framework. Class B operators know how to operate and maintain the equipment. Class C operators are the front-line employees who respond to spills and emergencies. Without documentation that trained, certified people held these roles, there is no accountability chain if a tank leaks and the ground catches fire or the water turns brown. The companies could not produce this basic paperwork.

They Stonewalled the EPA for Over Two Years

The EPA inspected all five facilities between July 21, 2021, and December 10, 2021. After finding violations, it sent a formal Notice of Violation and Request for Information on March 2, 2022. The companies failed to fully comply with that request from April 2022 all the way through October 2024. That is two and a half years of non-compliance with a direct federal request for information about underground tanks storing flammable, toxic petroleum products.

The EPA sent a follow-up reminder in July 2022. It sent emails. It made phone calls. The companies continued to under-respond. It took until September 2024, when the EPA sent a formal invitation to settlement discussions, for these companies to finally engage. Even then, they neither admitted nor denied any of the findings.

What Doesn’t Show Up in the Settlement Check

The Ground Beneath Your Feet Has No Lawyer

Underground storage tanks are not a theoretical risk. According to the EPA, there are over 500,000 regulated USTs in the United States, and tens of thousands of confirmed releases from these tanks have already contaminated soil and groundwater across the country. The rules these companies broke, specifically monthly walkthroughs and trained operator records, exist precisely because the industry has a documented history of quiet, slow, ruinous leaks that nobody catches until the damage is irreversible.

When a tank leaks benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, or xylene into the ground, those compounds move through soil and into aquifers at a pace that makes regulators look slow by comparison. Remediation of a contaminated site can cost millions of dollars and take decades. The communities living near these five stations, many of them working-class and rural, do not have the resources to fight a protracted legal battle over tainted groundwater. They drink what comes out of the tap and hope someone was doing their job.

The walkthrough inspections that these companies skipped are the absolute bare minimum of oversight. A monthly 30-day check is not a deep technical audit. It is a visual inspection to confirm that spill buckets are not full of water, that leak detection alarms are functional, and that the most basic warning systems are alive. Skipping that check is not an administrative oversight. It is choosing to operate blind while storing thousands of gallons of toxic, flammable liquid underground in communities that had no idea compliance had lapsed.

The Paperwork Wasn’t Bureaucracy. It Was Your Safety Net.

The requirement to maintain a list of designated Class A, Class B, and Class C operators is not red tape invented to annoy small business owners. Class C operators are typically the station attendants, the people on the ground when a spill happens. They are legally required to know how to respond: when to call emergency services, when to shut down the dispenser, how to prevent a small incident from becoming a catastrophic one. Without documented, trained Class C operators on file, there is no verified chain of accountability when fuel hits the pavement or seeps into the drain.

Class A and Class B operators carry even greater responsibility: regulatory compliance, equipment oversight, emergency planning. The EPA found these records missing or inadequate across all five facilities during periods stretching from July 2021 into August 2022. That covers the height of summer travel season at rural New Jersey gas stations, some of the highest-traffic periods these facilities would experience. Untrained hands on emergency response protocols at five fuel sites, simultaneously, for over a year.

The people most harmed by this kind of regulatory neglect are invisible in the settlement document. They are the families living a quarter mile from a tank they never knew existed. They are the kids whose school sits above a shallow aquifer. They are the farmers whose irrigation pulls from the same ground those tanks sit above. No fine, especially not one under $41,000 (about the same as a year’s tuition at a mid-tier state university), makes those people whole. The settlement acknowledges no victims because it was designed not to look for any.

The Two-Year Stonewall Was a Choice, Made Repeatedly

From April 2022 through October 2024, these companies received written notices, follow-up reminders, emails, and phone calls from federal investigators, and responded with incomplete information. This was not confusion or administrative backlog. The EPA sent its Notice of Violation in March 2022, sent a follow-up reminder four months later, and continued follow-up outreach for over two years. At some point, non-compliance with a federal enforcement request becomes a strategy.

The legal document reveals that the companies claimed financial hardship to justify paying the $40,000 fine in installments rather than a lump sum. Each respondent certified that paying the full penalty within 30 days would cause “undue financial hardship.” These are operating businesses, pumping and selling gasoline daily, pleading they cannot afford $40,000 upfront. Whether that claim is accurate or not, the EPA accepted it, and the fine gets spread over six monthly payments at 7% annual interest, totaling $40,777.79 (roughly what it costs to buy a midsize used pickup truck).

Straight from the Document: The Quotes That Should Make You Furious

“EPA determined that the Respondents failed to: (1) fully respond to the NOV/IRL; (2) conduct periodic walkthrough inspections every 30 days; and (3) maintain a list of designated operators.” — EPA’s Preliminary Statement, Consent Agreement and Final Order

“Comply fully, from April 2022 to October 2024, with Requests for Information submission by the owner or operator pursuant to Section 9005 of Subtitle I of the Solid Waste Disposal Act… in relation to all five facilities.” — EPA Findings of Fact, Paragraph 10(a): the duration of the information stonewalling

“Each Respondent has submitted a signed, certified statement of its current financial condition articulating a basis for its contention that it cannot pay the penalty in full within 30 days of the Effective Date without experiencing an undue financial hardship.” — Consent Agreement, Penalty Payment, Paragraph 3: the financial hardship claim

“Respondents neither admit nor deny EPA’s Findings of Fact and Conclusion of law set forth below.” — Consent Agreement Preliminary Statement: the standard legal escape hatch that lets them walk away without accountability

“Nothing herein shall be construed to limit the power of the EPA to undertake any action against any of the Respondents or any person in response to conditions that may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to the public health, welfare, or the environment.” — Consent Agreement, Paragraph 20: the EPA reserves the right to act if things get worse. They are not yet saying things are fine.

The Real Cost: Environment, Public Health, and Who Gets Left Holding the Bill

Environmental Degradation

The entire federal UST regulatory program exists because of a documented environmental crisis. Leaking underground storage tanks are among the most common sources of groundwater contamination in the United States. The chemicals stored in these tanks, primarily gasoline and diesel, contain benzene, a known carcinogen, as well as MTBE, toluene, and other compounds that dissolve easily in water and resist breakdown in soil. A single gallon of gasoline can render millions of gallons of groundwater undrinkable.

Three of these five facilities sit in or near New Jersey’s Pinelands, a federally designated National Reserve sitting atop one of the most significant aquifer systems on the Eastern Seaboard. The Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer Complex beneath the Pinelands holds an estimated 17 trillion gallons of some of the cleanest water in the mid-Atlantic region. Dennis Township and Dorchester are in the heart of that zone. Monthly walkthrough inspections at those sites were not optional paperwork. They were the surveillance layer protecting a national environmental treasure.

The EPA’s own regulations at 40 C.F.R. § 280.36 describe walkthrough inspections as checks on both spill prevention equipment and release detection equipment. Spill prevention catches surface leaks at the dispenser. Release detection catches subsurface leaks from the tank itself. When neither is being regularly verified as operational, the environmental monitoring system is effectively offline. No one was confirming, on the required 30-day cycle, that the instruments watching for a slow leak into the Pinelands aquifer were functioning.

Public Health

Benzene exposure from contaminated drinking water is not a theoretical risk. The EPA classifies benzene as a Group A human carcinogen, meaning there is sufficient evidence it causes cancer in humans. The primary pathway for community exposure near leaking USTs is contaminated groundwater used for drinking, cooking, and bathing. Long-term exposure at even low concentrations is linked to leukemia, anemia, and immune system disorders.

The regulatory violations documented in this case specifically include the failure to maintain trained Class C operators. Class C operators are the human beings at the pump who are supposed to respond when something goes wrong at ground level: a spill at the dispenser, an alarm triggering from the underground release detection system, a vehicle impact on equipment. Without certified, documented Class C operators on duty across all five sites during the violation periods, the first line of human response to a fuel release was operating without verified training. In a spill scenario, that gap between trained and untrained response can determine whether contamination stays contained or reaches the storm drain, the soil, the water table.

The source document explicitly names rural communities in Cape May and Cumberland Counties, areas with significant elderly and agricultural populations with above-average dependence on private wells and small municipal water systems. These populations have less redundancy in their water supply and fewer resources to detect, treat, or legally pursue contamination. They are exactly the communities that federal UST regulations were designed to protect, and they are the communities these violations left exposed.

Economic Inequality

The penalty structure in this settlement reveals a stark imbalance. Five operating gas station businesses, generating daily revenue from fuel sales, successfully argued financial hardship to avoid paying $40,000 (the cost of a modest used car) in a single payment. The federal government accepted this, set up a six-installment payment plan, and charged 7% annual interest on the balance, collecting a total of $40,777.79 (roughly the median annual income for a service worker in New Jersey). Meanwhile, the cost of cleaning up a confirmed petroleum release from a UST routinely runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, often exceeding $1 million, and is frequently borne by state environmental cleanup funds, which means taxpayers.

New Jersey operates the Underground Storage Tank Improvement Fund to help cover remediation costs. That fund draws on surcharges paid by UST owners, but when companies fail to comply with basic regulatory requirements and the fine for getting caught is under $41,000, the math does not work in the public’s favor. The deterrence value of a fine that a multi-site fuel operator can pay off in six months is effectively zero. The communities near these sites bear the environmental risk; the operator bears a penalty smaller than the annual salary of one of their own employees.

Rural South Jersey, where three of these five stations operate, is not a wealthy region. Cape May County and Cumberland County have median household incomes well below the state average. These are communities where a contaminated well is a crisis with no easy exit, where families cannot simply switch to bottled water permanently, where a lawsuit against a fuel company requires resources most residents do not have. The regulatory fine that closed this case does nothing to compensate those communities for the risk they were silently exposed to during the years these companies skipped their safety obligations.

What the Math Actually Says

Who Is Watching, and What You Can Do About It

The Corporate Leadership on Record

The settlement document names Satwinder S. Multani as the signatory for all four respondent companies, described as President of Ocean Food and Fuels LLC, S&N Multani LLC, Multani & Sons LLC, and Latty & Amrita Petroleum Inc., operating from 1200 Laurel Oak Road, Suite 108, Voorhees, New Jersey 08043. A second individual, Robbie Multani, is also copied on the final settlement document at the same address. Both are reachable through the corporate domain satrajinc.com.

Please visit this link to see that above consent agreement in the EPA’s website: https://yosemite.epa.gov/oa/rhc/epaadmin.nsf/Filings/4C3CAD23D4EEAC4585258CAC006EA94F/$File/Ocean257502CAFO.pdf

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