A Small Town Closure

As some of you may know, I grew up in a small town; population of around 300 people. I know some people consider living in a small town to be a drag, because many of the people are like your neighbors and there's not a whole lot to do. But to be honest, I couldn't imagine living anywhere else when I was younger. It provided a great upbringing and I always found something to do. You develop a great loyalty to that place, even though you may not live there regularly anymore, which I don't. However, I frequently visit and continue to keep up with everything that happens there. Not a lot goes on, but when something does, you tend to hear about it pretty quickly.

In the past month, the local gas station in town shut down. It's been in the community for a long time and everybody has bought gas there at some time or another. Yes, gas does tend to be more expensive there than the larger populated areas nearby, but when you live some distance away from those places, you don't really have much choice than to fuel up there. And if you need a small amount of gas for a lawn mower, it sure beats driving miles down the road. It provides a great convenience for the community and the tourists driving by. And they didn't just sell gas, either, but many other items. Now there is doubt that it will ever reopen again.

According to talk around town, a gas line started leaking fuel into the ground. It's unknown how long it had leaked and the extent of the pollution, but it sounds it could be significant enough to where they may have to demolish the building. It appears the fuel even got under the building. A small co-op store a couple miles up the road had a similar problem 15 years ago and ended up shutting down for good. The costs for such a clean-up are quite expensive. They never tore down the building, but they had to excavate much of the polluted soil around the building. Plus they built a pollution monitoring station for the ground water and drilled many different wells. Something very similar could end up happening at this most recent case. And it's unfortunate it had to close down, because it has always done good business.

The business went under new ownership earlier this year and the new people seemed to be making some real positive changes with the store. They were putting some money into the place by doing a small amount of remodeling and rearranging the store. You hate to see someone who just moved into the area end up shutting down because of something like this. Usually it's because of finances or radical changes that turn people away. But this is an environmental issue and something that will likely take a long time to get fixed. When it's something like pollution, state environmental agencies will be on your back making sure everything is right before it's even possible to start selling gas. And what will hurt the most is that this business won't have a presense in our community for some time to come, if ever again.

As I mentioned earlier, the store ended up closing down about two to three weeks ago, so many of the details are still unknown. But when you live in a small town, you end up finding out one way or another. I'm sure this will be very much the same. Who knows exactly what will end up happening. Maybe the pollution is only minor and it'll take a few weeks to clean up. However, that's probably the best case scenario and usually it never ends up being that way. Time will tell and if we end up being without this gas station, maybe someone else in the community will step up and build a new store. You never know what will end up happening in a situation like this.