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Forced to evacuate: Flathead Lake couple must leave home because of fuel spill
By VINCE DEVLIN of the Missoulian
April 22, 2008
Ron and Barbara Kohler built their house on Flathead Lake together. They hauled the rock for their fireplace from a quarry near Plains. Because of a 6,400-gallon gas spill earlier this month on Highway 35 near their home, they are now forced to leave the place they love.
Photo by MICHAEL GALLACHER/Missoulian
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POLSON - The stoplights that filtered two lanes of traffic into one around the crash site are gone.
The grass has been replanted, straw covers the barrow pit where the gasoline tanker overturned as well as the other side of the road, where crews dug trenches in hopes of capturing the fuel.
The lane of highway dug up when 1,400 tons of soil were removed has been repaved, and traffic on Highway 35 can now glide by unimpeded.
To the casual observer, it looks like everything on the east shore of Flathead Lake has returned to normal since April 2, when 6,380 gallons of gasoline were dumped in the barrow pit during an accident that closed Highway 35 for six hours.
But 510 feet off the highway to the northwest of the scene, at the lakeside residence of a retired couple, “normal” hasn't been a part of the vocabulary for more than two weeks.
And the news keeps getting worse.
The most devastating arrived earlier this week, when Ron and Barbara Kohler were told they would not be able to move back into their home.
They built this three-level house 17 years ago, largely on their own. Ron designed it. After others helped frame it and hoist the beams into place, the Kohlers personally did everything from the plumbing to the sheetrock work.
They hauled 18 tons of hand-picked rock themselves from the Plains and Niarada areas to construct the two-story fireplace in the vaulted living room. The beautiful place on Misty Lagoon Lane has been the gathering site for the Kohlers' five grown children and 10 grandchildren for 17 years.
They play in the lake, dip their feet in the cool springs that bubble up from the earth in front of the house. Ron, now 70, built his own little creek, pool and waterfall, pumping water from the springs up next to the house and letting it wend its way back to the springs through a series of rockwork. Barbara, 68, cares for countless plants and flowers she's planted around the property, much of it framed by mock orange bushes whose white blossoms in a few weeks will all but sparkle in a Flathead Lake sunset.
The Kohlers vacated the house several days after the tanker truck accident, when gas vapors began seeping into their house. They only moved a few feet, into their neighbors' summer place.
But now the “temporary” move has taken on a life all its own.
The Kohlers have been told they can't stay in their place anymore. They don't know when they're leaving. They don't know where they're going.
Worst of all, they don't know how long they'll have to stay away.
It could be years, they've been told.
It could be decades.
At 8:30 a.m. Friday, representatives from several agencies and companies involved in trying to keep the gasoline from reaching Flathead Lake gathered in a conference room at the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Natural Resources Department in Polson.
Paul Rodgers of Cedar Creek Engineering delivered the proverbial good news/bad news.
Good: No raw product has shown up anywhere.
Bad: That means recovering the 5,000 gallons of gasoline from the sub-surface “will happen at a much slower rate.”
At the present rate, of about a gallon or two a day, it would take eight years, Rodgers said, and the Kohlers say they've been told it could be as long as 40 years.
"When something like this happens, you just want to see an end to it," Barbara said as a dozen or more men worked in the woods and on the shoreline on various spill-related projects. “But by the time there's an end to this, we'll probably be dead and gone.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will take over as the regulatory body in charge of the site, it was announced Friday, and a much larger water treatment system will be installed on community property in the subdivision.
The system will include two 15-cubic-foot carbon filters, the same size as those currently on the lake bed filtering water from the springs, as backups to two new 40-cubic-foot filters that will be installed in a 24-by-32-foot building to be constructed.
That must be finished before the lake rises to full pool next month. The Kohlers and their neighbor, Dennis Arnold of Colorado, will also see a 75-foot trench dug along their adjacent shorefronts, along with a concrete barrier along the beachfront, in continuing efforts to keep the gasoline from reaching Flathead Lake.
"We've had no free product show up in the springs," Rodgers said, "and we're becoming more and more confident it may never arrive. It may have hung up somewhere in the bedrock.”
It's that bedrock that slopes off the Mission Mountains in a northwesterly direction that has apparently steered the 5,000 gallons of gasoline toward the Kohlers' property, and made their home ground zero.
Carolina Casualty, the insurance carrier for Keller Transport of Billings, which owned the tanker truck whose second unit, or “pup,” flipped over on the narrow highway, will arrange for the Kohlers to receive a list of “comparable” lakefront rentals they can move into.
Whether it comes furnished or unfurnished, most of the Kohlers' belongings will have to be removed from their home. The gas vapors inside will invade everything from seat cushions to curtains if left there.
"We're providing some options" for the Kohlers, said Michael White, Carolina Casualty's representative at the meeting. “A final decision will be made at a later date. This is an emotional time for them, and we want to give them some time.”
Asked how much the spill has cost so far, White said, "I wouldn't even hope to be able to tell you that."
Returning from a trip to Missoula on Thursday, the Kohlers noticed a now familiar petroleum-based odor in their vehicle as they drove through the Mission Valley.
It must be from the older, smoke-belching car in front of them, Ron decided, but when the car turned off and the smell stayed strong, he blamed it on the exhaust of a diesel truck up ahead.
After they passed the truck and the aroma remained, Ron turned off the heater and still, there it was.
"We can't escape it!" Barbara cried.
But they could only laugh when they finally discovered the seal was broken on a small container of oil they had purchased in Missoula, and was leaking out.
The Kohlers are doing a remarkable job of keeping their chins up, even as they face the chance that they may never again be able to live in the dream home they built to retire to.
But it gets to Barbara every now and then, and she has to excuse herself as the tears come - especially when the Kohlers give a reporter and photographer a tour of the home they built, but is now uninhabitable. Every window that opens is, every ceiling fan is on, and four floor fans suck the gas vapors out of the basement storage room that's built up against the bedrock along the east shore.
"It'd be nice to get mad, but I don't even know who to get mad at,” Barbara said. “Besides, we're not that kind of people, anyway.”
The Kohlers met about half a century ago on a New Year's Eve at the Chicken Inn in East Missoula, where Barbara had come with her family, and Ron dropped in to listen to his father, who was playing drums in the band that night.
They both worked for the Mountain Bell Telephone Co., living in Missoula, Great Falls, and Billings at times, but mostly in Helena, and by the time Ron retired after 30 years, it was called US West.
They found this property on Flathead Lake in 1988.
"The only reason we even saw it was that our future son-in-law's grandparents had lived on the lake forever," Barbara said. “We were invited to their 50th wedding anniversary, and Scott brought us over and showed us the property. There was a ‘for sale' sign nailed on a tree and nothing else here.”
The owner, she said, was anxious to sell, “and that was back when a person could afford it. We bought it with the intention of retiring here.”
Two years later they arrived with an 18-foot trailer and - although a parent's illness took them away for several months - set about building a place to live.
"We were kind of homeless,” Barbara said. “I guess now we're right back where we started.”
They wonder if there is any use in finishing the two-car garage with a hobby room for Barbara up above that they were building when the tanker overturned. They wonder if the new place they rent will have a garage where Ron can continue to work on the 1959 Chrysler Imperial that, in the 1960s, was the Kohler family car but that's sat unused for 25 years.
They wonder what to take, what to leave behind, what to store, where they're going. They wonder what the coming water treatment plant will look like, what kind of mess their shoreline will become.
Are they liable if one of the many workers is injured on their property? Will they have to leave their house unlocked so workers can come and go, or provide keys to Lord only knows how many people?
They wonder where their 50th wedding anniversary, coming on Sept. 12, 2009, and planned for this spot on East Bay that they love, will now be held.
The Kohlers aren't upset at all the work that's being done in and around their home.
"They've got to protect the lake,” Barbara said. “They've got to be ready for raw product if it shows up."
They do hope the Montana Department of Transportation finds a way to limit what's being hauled, and the types of trucks hauling it, on narrow, winding Highway 35. The department has always maintained it can't, because 35 is a federally funded highway, but director Jim Lynch has directed his staff to find out if the state has options in the wake of this crash.
Some truckers prefer Highway 35 because, even though the posted speed limit is less, it's a more level route than the more modern and safer Highway 93 on the west shore of Flathead, where steep inclines can cost truckers fuel and time.
"The two gallons of extra fuel it would have cost this trucker to go up the other side of the lake is starting to look really cheap," Barbara said. “No one is out to stop the trucking industry, but let's be reasonable. There are things that shouldn't be hauled on this road.
"Either Flathead Lake is a resource worth protecting," she said, "or it's not."
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