EvilCorporations.com • Docket CWA-10-2025-0178 | Vancouver, WA • 20 min read

Oil on the Columbia: How a Marathon Petroleum Subsidiary Left the Pacific Northwest’s Most Important River Exposed for Years

The River Doesn’t Know What a Consent Agreement Is

The Columbia River runs 1,243 miles. It drains parts of seven U.S. states and one Canadian province. It is the largest river flowing into the Pacific Ocean from North America. For the Indigenous nations who have lived along its banks for thousands of years, the Yakama, the Umatilla, the Warm Springs, the Nez Perce, the river is not infrastructure. It is identity. It is food. It is ceremony. It is the reason people are still here.

The salmon that still run the Columbia, despite a century of dams and agricultural runoff and industrial pollution trying to kill them off, are not a statistic. They are the reason those nations negotiated treaty rights that courts have upheld for over 150 years. The salmon do not appear in Docket CWA-10-2025-0178. They never do. Legal documents describe “navigable waters” and “harmful quantities” and “secondary containment capacity.” They do not describe a chinook salmon that cannot survive in water coated in petroleum.

The Tesoro facility at 2211 Saint Francis Lane in Vancouver, Washington, sits 2,000 feet from the Columbia River. Two thousand feet is roughly four and a half city blocks. Stormwater from that facility, the rain and runoff that falls on the property and drains through it, flows directly to the Columbia. That is not a hypothetical pathway or a modeled risk. That is how the facility was designed to drain. The EPA’s own consent agreement says so explicitly.

For over a year, from at least March 2022 until October 2023, the largest tank at that facility, Tank 93501, contained up to 92,538 barrels of oil. The containment wall built to catch that oil if the tank ever failed could hold 89,090 barrels at most. That is a shortfall of 3,448 barrels, approximately 144,816 gallons of oil with nowhere to go except the ground, then the drainage system, then the Columbia River, then the Pacific Ocean.

Nobody spilled. This time. But the point of spill prevention law is that you do not wait for the spill. You build the wall before the tank fails, because after the tank fails, there is no wall that matters. The people downstream from Vancouver, Washington, the families in Oregon communities along the Columbia, the tribal members who fish those waters, the birds, the fish, the wetlands at the river’s edge, they had no idea that the containment math did not add up. They were not told. They could not opt out. They simply lived within four and a half blocks of a legal gap in an oil company’s paperwork, and trusted that someone was watching.

The EPA was not watching. Tesoro told the state itself in July 2022. The EPA found out in February 2023, not from an inspection, but from reading a copy of a letter the state sent back to Tesoro. The federal agency that exists to protect the nation’s waters learned about this violation from a piece of correspondence it received second-hand. The EPA’s own inspection of the facility did not happen until October 4, 2024, over two years after the problem was first identified.

The settlement asks Tesoro to pay $99,000 and to have already fixed the problems, which they had done before the consent agreement was even finalized. There is no requirement to notify the communities who lived downriver. There is no community fund. There is no public health assessment. There is a payment to the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, which is a government account, not a river. The Columbia River is still there. The salmon are still running. And the next tank farm up the coast is operating right now under its own set of SPCC Plans, and whether those plans are accurate is something most of us will only find out after the fact.

What the Document Actually Says

These are verbatim quotes pulled directly from Docket CWA-10-2025-0178. No paraphrasing. No spin. Read the language they used to describe what happened.

“Respondent identified a deficiency in the tank farm secondary containment volume based on a review of the re-strapping report (issue date: March 17, 2022) that was conducted for Tank 93501. Respondent notified the Washington Department of Ecology of this finding on July 18, 2022.”

Consent Agreement, Paragraph 3.17 — Docket CWA-10-2025-0178

• The company found the problem internally on March 17, 2022. It waited four months before telling the state regulator. The federal EPA was not notified directly at all; it learned of the issue from a copied letter in February 2023, nearly a full year after the company first discovered the deficiency.
• No law appears to have been broken by the four-month delay between discovery and state notification, but the sequence makes clear that public regulators were not the first line of defense here. The company’s own paperwork was.

“The 2013 SPCC Plan relied on ‘effective operational height’ for Tank 93501 to calculate secondary containment in lieu of Tank 93501’s shell capacity as required by 40 C.F.R. §§ 112.2 and 112.8(c). The 2013 SPCC Plan based secondary containment determinations on an effective operational height of 85,731 barrels.”

Consent Agreement, Paragraph 3.37 — Docket CWA-10-2025-0178

• The law requires containment sized for the full shell capacity of the tank: 92,538 barrels. The company’s spill plan, in use since at least 2013, used a smaller operational figure of 85,731 barrels to justify a smaller containment wall. That is a difference of 6,807 barrels, roughly 285,894 gallons, that the containment math was never built to handle.
• This means the wrong calculation was in use for at least nine years before it was corrected, across multiple versions of the spill prevention plan, certified by licensed Professional Engineers each time it was updated.

“Accordingly, the existing diked tank farm secondary containment was not sufficient to contain Tank 93501’s shell capacity of 92,538 barrels when considering a design precipitation storm event and other piping and tanks’ displacement.”

Consent Agreement, Paragraph 3.40 — Docket CWA-10-2025-0178

• The phrase “design precipitation storm event” is the legal way of saying: if it rains a normal amount while the tank is full and then fails, the containment system would overflow. The shortfall was not just dry-weather math; rain made it worse.
• The Columbia River region receives significant seasonal rainfall. This was not an obscure edge case. It was a foreseeable condition, which is exactly why the regulation requires accounting for it.

“The SPCC Plans prior to May 15, 2025 failed to provide a prediction for discharges from the aboveground, overhead process piping between the railroad spur area and the Facility tank farm.”

Consent Agreement, Paragraph 3.29 — Docket CWA-10-2025-0178

• Overhead pipes running between the railcar unloading area and the tank farm were never included in the spill flow prediction analysis. The company’s spill prevention plan did not account for how much oil would spill, in what direction, or at what rate if those pipes failed. That requirement has been in the federal regulations for years.
• This violation was corrected on May 15, 2025, meaning the gap persisted through every SPCC Plan update going back to at least the 2013 plan, across the January 2022, October 2022, December 2023, and October 2024 plans, before anyone finally added it.

“Respondent neither admits nor denies the specific factual allegations contained in this Consent Agreement.”

Consent Agreement, Paragraph 4.2 — Docket CWA-10-2025-0178

• This is standard language in EPA administrative settlements and it is worth naming plainly: the company signs a document that describes three violations in detail, agrees to pay a fine for those violations, and simultaneously says it does not admit the violations happened. This is a structural feature of how corporate environmental enforcement works, designed to prevent the consent agreement from being used as evidence of wrongdoing in any subsequent civil lawsuit.
• The community has no recourse built into this agreement. No admission means no clear foundation for any resident or tribal nation to pursue follow-on legal action based on this document alone.

Who Actually Pays When the Containment Wall Is Too Small

Environmental Degradation

The Columbia River is one of the most ecologically significant waterways in North America. The deficiencies documented in this case created a direct, documented pathway from oil storage tanks to that river.

• The facility’s stormwater drains directly to the Columbia River. This is confirmed in the consent agreement itself. Any oil that escaped the containment system during a storm event, tank failure, or pipe rupture had a pre-built route to one of the continent’s largest salmon rivers.
• The containment shortfall of at least 3,448 barrels (approximately 144,816 gallons) represents the volume of oil that would have had no barrier between a tank rupture and the Columbia River drainage system. For comparison, the Exxon Valdez spilled approximately 257,000 barrels. A single containment failure at this facility could not approach that scale, but the Columbia River’s salmon runs are already stressed; even a local spill of thousands of gallons of petroleum can devastate a spawning reach for years.
• The overhead piping between the railcar unloading area and the tank farm had no documented secondary containment and no spill flow prediction in any plan before May 2025. A rupture in those pipes, carrying oil through an above-ground line with no containment below it, would deposit oil directly onto the facility grounds with no modeled response plan and no engineered catch system.
• The 2016 Spill Containment Study, used as a formal attachment to the company’s October 2022 SPCC Plan, was built on the wrong volume figure. That study was the engineering foundation of the facility’s containment compliance for years. It was not based on the tank’s actual shell capacity as required by law. It was based on how full the company planned to fill the tank, which is a different number and a legally insufficient basis for spill prevention design.

Public Health

Oil contamination of the Columbia River creates documented public health risks for the millions of people and tribal nations who depend on it for drinking water, subsistence fishing, and cultural practices.

• The Columbia River Basin is home to multiple tribal nations, including the Yakama Nation, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and the Nez Perce Tribe, all of whom hold treaty-protected fishing rights on the river. A petroleum contamination event would directly threaten subsistence salmon harvests that are both a food source and a federally protected treaty right. None of these communities were party to, or mentioned in, the consent agreement.
• Communities along the Columbia River in Oregon and Washington rely on the river as a water source. Petroleum contamination, particularly polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) found in crude and refined oil products, can persist in river sediment for years and bioaccumulate in fish tissue. People who eat fish from contaminated stretches are exposed to those compounds even after surface contamination is cleaned up.
• The facility handles oil for storage, transshipment, and distribution, meaning the specific grade and composition of petroleum stored in Tank 93501 is not specified in the public document. The health impacts of a spill depend on what type of oil was stored; refined petroleum products carry different volatile organic compound profiles than crude oil, and different risk profiles for respiratory exposure during a spill event.
• Workers at the facility, and emergency responders who would have been first on scene in the event of a containment failure, were operating in an environment where the spill prediction plans were incomplete. First responders cannot make effective decisions about evacuation zones, shelter-in-place orders, or personal protective equipment without accurate spill flow data. That data was missing from the plans for years.

Economic Inequality

Who absorbs the cost of inadequate oil spill containment is never random. It follows the same lines as every other form of industrial pollution exposure in the United States.

• The communities most economically vulnerable to a Columbia River oil spill are communities with the least political power to prevent facilities like this from being built near them. Vancouver, Washington’s lower-income neighborhoods and the tribal communities along the river do not have the lobbying infrastructure or legal resources that Marathon Petroleum employs to negotiate outcomes like this consent agreement.
• The $99,000 fine is paid to the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund, a federal account. None of it goes to the communities, tribal nations, or ecosystems that were at risk during the years the containment was inadequate. There is no mechanism in this agreement for affected communities to receive any portion of the penalty, no matter how close they live to the facility.
• Marathon Petroleum, the corporate parent of Tesoro Logistics Operations LLC, reported net income of over $14 billion in 2023, according to publicly available financial reporting. A $99,000 penalty represents a vanishingly small fraction of one day’s earnings for the parent company. For the working-class families and tribal communities downstream, the cost of a real spill, in lost fishing income, contaminated water, health impacts, and cultural harm, would be measured in years and generations, not a one-time payment.
• The “neither admits nor denies” settlement structure specifically protects the company from civil liability exposure based on this proceeding. That protection is not available to individuals. A private citizen who caused 144,816 gallons of oil to threaten a major river would face criminal prosecution. A corporation signs a consent agreement and pays a fine that costs less than a mid-range company vehicle.

Run the Numbers

This Is Not Over: Who to Watch and What to Do

The consent agreement is signed. The fine is paid. The containment wall was fixed in October 2023 and the SPCC Plans were updated in May and June 2025. On paper, this case is closed. In practice, the same company still operates the same facility on the same river, and the enforcement mechanisms that allowed this to drag on for years are unchanged.

Corporate Leadership Parties to This Agreement

• Regina Zolnor, Vice President, Tesoro Logistics Operations LLC: Signed the consent agreement on January 9, 2026, certifying that Tesoro has corrected the alleged violations and binding the company to the terms of the settlement.
• Edward J. Kowalski, Director, Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Division, EPA Region 10: Signed for the EPA on March 12, 2026. His division determined that $99,000 was the appropriate penalty after weighing the factors required by law.

Regulatory Watchlist

• U.S. EPA Region 10 (Seattle): The primary federal enforcer for Pacific Northwest water quality. Compliance Officer Steven Potokar (Potokar.Steven@epa.gov) is the named contact in this case. Region 10 covers Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska. Public inspection reports for facilities in this region are available via ECHO (Enforcement and Compliance History Online) at echo.epa.gov.
• Washington Department of Ecology: The state regulator that first received the self-report in July 2022 and granted Tesoro’s “conditional approval” to keep operating the undersized containment system. Ecology’s Oil Spill Prevention program can be monitored through the agency’s public records portal. They issued the inspection and the conditional approvals that allowed the facility to operate through the deficiency period.
• EPA Office of Inspector General: If you believe the $99,000 penalty represents a failure of enforcement proportionality, the OIG accepts public complaints about EPA enforcement decisions at epa.gov/office-inspector-general.
• U.S. Department of Justice, Environment and Natural Resources Division: The EPA consent agreement preserves the right to pursue criminal sanctions and injunctive relief separately from this civil penalty proceeding. The ENRD is the office that would bring any criminal case.

What You Can Actually Do

• Contact EPA Region 10 directly: Under the Freedom of Information Act, you can request the full inspection report from the October 4, 2024 EPA inspection of the Tesoro Vancouver facility, any additional correspondence between EPA and Ecology about this facility, and prior inspection records. File at foia.gov or contact Region 10 directly at 1200 Sixth Avenue, Suite 155, Seattle, WA 98101.
• Connect with tribal environmental offices: The Yakama Nation, Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, and the Nez Perce Tribe all have environmental departments that monitor Columbia River water quality and treaty rights enforcement. These nations have legal standing that individual residents do not, and they have been fighting for the river far longer than any federal agency has existed. Their environmental programs are public-facing and welcome community support.
• Support Columbia Riverkeeper: Columbia Riverkeeper (columbiariverkeeper.org) is an independent advocacy organization that uses legal tools, public records, and community organizing to hold industrial polluters accountable on the Columbia River. They do not depend on EPA enforcement timelines. They file their own suits and submit their own public comments on permit renewals, including for facilities like this one.
• Comment on facility permits and SPCC plan reviews: Both EPA and Washington Ecology have public comment processes for facility operating permits and spill prevention plan reviews. Organized, specific, legally-grounded public comments from affected community members carry more weight than form letters. Columbia Riverkeeper and similar organizations can help you submit effective comments without legal expertise.
• Demand penalty proportionality from your congressional representatives: The Clean Water Act permits penalties up to $295,564 for violations of this type. The EPA assessed $99,000, 33 cents on the dollar. Congress sets both the law and the EPA’s enforcement budget. Representatives on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee have direct jurisdiction over EPA enforcement authority. Named, specific constituent pressure about specific enforcement outcomes is the mechanism that actually moves those committees.