Underground Oil Tank?
We’re first-time buyers looking at a brownstone but have encountered two issues and I’m getting conflicting answers on how big an issue they are: 1. No C of O and an old open permit. We would like to do a small amount of work on the house so that we could rent part out. Do…
We’re first-time buyers looking at a brownstone but have encountered two issues and I’m getting conflicting answers on how big an issue they are:
1. No C of O and an old open permit. We would like to do a small amount of work on the house so that we could rent part out. Do either of the above situations make that more difficult?
2. Inspector noticed an old oil vent in front of the house. Owner says it’s plumbing, which it clearly isn’t. I’m not sure why they wouldn’t know about an oil tank; how big a deal it is to find out definitively if it is there/was properly decommissioned; and am skeeved out by the blase response. If you’ve managed to read this far, do you have any thoughts on whether I’m rightly anxious or if this is just part of the package of buying in NYC?
First of all you don’t know if the tank was abandoned. When I abandoned my tank, I took out a permit and had it inspected. So there is a record of it with the town(yeah I live in Joisey now). If there’s an old oil vent then the pipe for filling the tank should be close by. See if you can locate it. Open it up and use something long(like a broom handle or tape measure) that you can put in it to measure if there’s any oil in it. Check with the DOB and see if there’s any records of it being abandoned , sand filled or taken out of the ground. If you can’t obtain any of these things and there’s doubt that a tank is still there, then as they said in Monty Python & The Holy Grail…”RUN AWAY”!!!
If there is a tank and it leaks, and it’s leeched into the soil then you do not want that headache. It could run into the tens of thousands for clean-up.
Good luck.
Your mortgage company is going to care about the abandoned oil tank, and so likely is your insurance company. If the current owners claim to know nothing about it, chances are it was not properly abandoned (assuming it is in fact buried). I don’t know of any around here, but any of the companies that remove tanks should be able to figure out if one is underground using some fancy electronics, and can probably tell you more about it.
You are going to need a new C of O to do what you are talking about anyway so don’t worry about there being no C of O, unless you think you have a legal (insert # of apts) family and DOB/HPD thinks otherwise. The open permit can be taken care of by your new architect. Sometime the work never got done. How big is the pipe?