Monmouth St Open

Monmouth Way is finally open again, so let me tell you the whole story, because most people only heard pieces of it.

In September of 2024, an estimated 2,000 gallons of gasoline leaked out of the Harbor Sinclair station on Harbor Boulevard, owned by Neda Oil. The fuel got into the soil, the groundwater, and right into our city sewer line here on Monmouth Way. State officials called it a catastrophic failure. The containment area under a pump was full of gasoline, and the sensor that was supposed to catch it was not working.

Pierpont got evacuated twice in four days, on September 19 and September 22. About 150 people on Bayshore Avenue had to leave their homes, and more than 4,000 people in Pierpont were warned they might have to go. The city declared a local emergency.

Then came November of 2025. A weekly water sample came back showing gasoline at Monmouth and Pierpont, 300 parts per billion. The state told the city to issue a do not use water order. The city shut off the water main on Monmouth Way, handed out bottled water, set up water distribution centers at Marina Park and the city maintenance yard, and brought in shower and laundry trailers for the Marriott and Motel 6. The first two emergency alerts only went out to landlines. The next day the lab re-ran the original samples and said it was a false positive. Every other test came back clean, and the order was lifted on November 26. The water was never actually contaminated. Pierpont went through all of that over a bad lab result.

And it still was not over. In January of this year, after the rains, gasoline turned up in the storm drain right here at Pierpont and Monmouth, and the odor calls started again.

Monmouth Way stayed closed for about a year and a half, from September 2024 until March of this year, while the city ran a bypass pump around 335 feet of sewer pipe the gasoline had eaten through. Two tries to reline that pipe failed because of the gasoline. The city replaced it.

What did it cost us. The city's costs were already estimated at 2.7 million dollars by November of 2024. The sewer replacement by itself was a 1.5 million dollar project paid out of the city's disaster recovery fund. The cleanup of the gasoline itself is the station owner's bill, under the state water board, and it is still going. As of March, about 975 gallons of gasoline had been pulled out of the monitoring wells, and the groundwater cleanup is expected to run about two more years.

The street is back. The story is not over.