CARTER CITY — A Carter City widow has waited at her crossroads home for a state program to clean up contaminated fuel tanks and soil, and bring to a close a bureaucratic mess that has spanned 20 years.

“I just want to know when all this will be over,” said Betty Ramey, sitting in front of decades of paperwork and correspondence between her late husband, J.C. “Carl” Ramey, the Underground Storage Tank Branch and Henkle-Myer Environmental Services, the contractor. Carl Ramey died in mid-June thinking the ordeal was over. He was wrong.

Betty Ramey’s crossroads is a house and former store/gas station at the junction of Ky. 2 and Ky. 7 near Carter City. Before the interstate system was built and before the A-A Highway was even thought of, the store, owned in the 1950s by Carl’s father, was a regular stop along the a route that took eastern Kentuckians from their rural homes and farms to jobs in the industrial centers of the upper Midwest.

The house and store were built in the late 1940s with creek rock brought from nearby Buffalo Creek and handfitted into the walls. Carl and Betty Ramey moved into the house in the early 1960s, when both were schoolteachers in Carter and Greenup counties. The store was turned into Carl’s woodworking shop and they stayed there after they both retired in the late 1980’s: Carl as principal at nearby Carter City Elementary School; and Betty from Warnick Elementary School in Greenup County.

In 1984, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that required underground storage tanks to be registered starting in 1986, with the goal of removing leeching storage tanks. In 1992, the Kentucky General Assembly created the Petroleum Storage Tank Account for tank owners. The Assembly raised the fuel fee from 0.4 cents per gallon to 1.4 cents per gallon to cover the cost of the removal program. Ramey now deals with the Underground Storage Tank Branch, part of the Department of Environmental Protection, under the energy and Environment Cabinet.

According to an Associated Press series produced in June 1997, funding for the programs was in trouble from the start, as claims for the money poured in faster than the gasoline tax could replenish it. In 1996, the General Assembly raided $3.8 million and used it for Kentucky State Police raises, giving rise to the concern that lawmakers would use the fund like a revolving line of credit at a bank. The raiding has been repeated several times.

 The Rameys had a window in early 1988, before the law to register underground tanks went into effect, to simply have the tanks removed at their own cost and “be done with it.” The tanks wouldn’t have been registered and would not have been counted. Their 20-year odyssey of frustration and worry would never have started.

“Everyone told us just to get rid of them,” said Ramey. Instead, she said, Carl Ramey worried more about the ramifications of being out of compliance at the federal level. They paid the $30 per tank, two 1,000-gal fuel tanks and one 500-gallon kerosene tank, per year to register and to begin the process of having them and all contaminated material removed. And then they waited.

That’s when events beyond their control began to take over. It took years for the original contractor, ATI, to get through a bankruptcy proceeding and the contracts it held, including the one to clean up the Ramey’s storage tanks, could be bid out to other companies. Hinkle-Meyer Environmental Services took over the Ramey’s case.

It would take until November 2000 to have the tanks removed, but the soil around the tanks and the test wells bored around the property continued to show contamination for a full 10 years. “They told me they were waiting to see if it all (the contaminates) would go away all by themselves,” said Ramey. This form of biodegradation is a process called natural attenuation, a method not endorsed by the U.S. Geological Survey because it simply takes too long. In June of this year, the contaminated material around the property was finally removed and hauled away by the contractor. But Carl Ramey was in intensive care at King’s Daughters Medical Center and would never see his home again. Betty Ramey said Carl died the very day the contractor covered her driveway with gravel and left.

Final closure on the Ramey situation depends on what is found at the site now that the tanks and 1,500 tons of contaminated dirt have been removed. Speaking from the Underground Storage Tank Branch late last week, environmental scientist Lori Terry said, “There is no time frame. It all hinges on what they find on that site.” She said the branch cannot give a time when “it’ll all be over” until the contractor turns in all the testing reports.

Documents stacked on Betty Ramey’s coffee table show the branch has paid out $210,991.74 to clear up the situation. She said she loves the house and the farmland around it, but wants to have the option of selling and moving on. She said she wishes Carl had lived long enough to see the problem resolved and that he could have retired without the worry and frustration that clouded his later years.

“Carl would never sell this property. He loved this farm. He loved everything about it. He died thinking that everything was finally OK with it.”

JOHN FLAVELL can be reached at jflavell@roadrunner.com or (606) 326-2659.