Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

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City wins 21st Tree City award by David Cloninger The Carolina Reporter Columbia has been named a 1999 Tree City USA for planting trees and ob serving Arbor Day, marking the 21st com secutive year the city has captured this honor. Sponsored by the National Arbor Day Association, the award of Tree City USA is given to a city that achieves four ob jectives during the course of a year. Those are: • Celebrating Arbor Day (Dec. 3 this year) by planting a tree and issuing a proclamation for the event. • Having a tree-related budget equal to $2 per capita. • Having a tree protection ordinance. • Having at least one city official responsible for tree care. Columbia and Cheraw are the only two cities in the state to win the award consistently, according to Joe Felder, for est management chief for the South Car olina Forestry Commission. Cheraw has won every year since 1978, while Co lumbia began its streak a year later. “The city really seems to care about preserving the natural environment in the city limits,” Felder said. “Colum bia is a good example of having both trees and high technology in one close set ting.” The award was commemorated by a flag and an honorary plaque. Also, a sign honoring the occasion will be added to Columbia city-limit signs. These pre sentations were made to City Manager Michael Bierman last week. Felder said he expects the city to keep up the tree-care traditions it has es tablished. “Right now, as far as we know, Co lumbia is planning to still keep up the Arbor Day holiday with a tree planting,” Felder said. “Some of the projects they’re considering are trees along the Vista area, a similar project on Main Street and then an upgrade on the trees on Main Street. There’s no question about us being a Tree City.” According to Felder, Columbia picks different species of trees for each Arbor Day celebration. So far, the city has plant ed seven different varieties, including spruce, crepe myrtle, dogwood, pine, oak, magnolia and the palmetto state tree. The Forestry Commission says Co lumbia is one of 28 cities in the state and 2,500 cities nationwide to receive the award this year. Debbie Price, tree care manager for Columbia City Council, is enjoying the notoriety of being part of a Tree City. “For Columbia to receive this award is just fantastic,” Price said. “It really showcases the city as a beautiful loca tion and gets Columbia’s name out to the rest of the country.” Since being appointed to her posi tion in 19%, Price has spearheaded the city’s drive to remain a Tree City by pushing for extensive beautification pro jects in the past three years. Among her achievements are some of the trees lining Assembly Street, wooden planter boxes around some of the tree bases on Main Street and renovations at Finlay Park. If park trees were damaged, Price and her crew repaired them. Besides these achievements, Price is also in charge of maintaining trees that have been planted on past Arbor Days. These are cared for on a constant rotat ing schedule so the city can make sure its diverse planting sites are all being equally cared for. “It’s a good position for an environ mentalist to have,” Price said of her job. “I really care about not only trees, but how they can develop in a city as big as Columbia.” With the help of people like Felder and Price, it’s no wonder that Columbia has remained a Tree City for as long as it has. These two hope they can contin ue to serve the city in their respective positions. “It’s a big responsibility, and we can live up to it,” Felder said. Book stores fight Internet rivals by Ashley Mathias The Carolina Reporter Technology has made us coach pota toes. We can sit in the luxury of our homes and order just about anything we want off the Internet, without having to fight the mobs at the mall or deal with a cashier who is having a bad day. Two of the more popular items ordered off the Internet are books and music. Book company giants, such as Books A-Million and Barnes & Noble, have Internet sites that only add to their mul timillion dollar sales. Many smaller book companies don’t have that kind of na tionwide exposure. a i r >n _ t t_ ruiuy uiavcd, tu-uwuci ui inciiap py Bookseller in Columbia, said his store combats the Internet competition with customer service. “When you order off the Internet, you don’t have that one-on-one customer ser vice that we can give you when you come in the store,” Graves said. “It’s also hard to get a feel for what the book is like when you are ordering off the Internet.” The Living Vine, a Christian book store with two locations in Columbia, has the same philosophy of Internet compe tition. “Wfe try to be very service oriented,” co-owner Kitsy Blanchard said. “By com ing in the store, we can help give you rec ommendations on books that the Internet can’t exactly give you. “If a customer is having problems in their marriage and they want to find a book to help them through their tough time, we can recommend an actual book suited just for their problem. An on line bookstore can’t do that.” Brian Woods, sales associate for The Book Dispensary on Decker Boulevard, said his store specializes in trade books, books they buy from customers and books that are out of print. Woods said the out-of-print books are what make them different from other bookstores. “A lot of people know that we are a secondhand bookstore, so we really don’t feel like we have a lot of competition against the bigger-name bookstores,” Wfoodssaid. Blanchard doesn’t think competition comes just from big bookstores, but also irom reian siuies. “To an extent, we compete with any other store that sells books,” Blanchard said. “You could say that we compete with Mi-Mart and Sam’s Wholesale because they sell Christian books also, but we still have that personal service that those stores can’t give you.” Graves thinks more of his competi tion comes from the location of the store than Internet. “I think we have more competition with the actual store locations than the online bookstores,” he said. “If we had a store in Harvard Square in New York, then we would be a big competitor with the other area bookstores.” Local booksellers have developed their own strategies for competing in the congested market Blanchard stands by The Living Vine’s customer service. “We have been in the community for 22 years and have established some cred ibility with the community,” Blanchard said. “Customers know that they can trust our service, and they khow that we can give them good recommendations.” After the rain... Photo by Judson Drennan Workers clear debris from the North Myrtle Beach strip, where heavy rains from Hurricane Floyd eroded a 50-yard stretch of the road. Parts of North and South Carolina received as much as 25 inches of rain, causing widespread flooding in coastal regions. State oil, gas tanks leaking underground by Rebecca Cronican The Carolina Reporter More than a fourth of about 13,000 underground oil and gas storage tanks in South Carolina are leaking, according to the S.C. Department of Health and En vironmental Control. A total of 234 are in Richland County. Underground storage tanks mainly include gasoline tanks but can include things like emergency generator tanks. “Eighty percent of the ground wa ter problems are associated with under ground tanks,” said Arthur Shrader of DHEC’s Division of Underground Stor age Tank Management. In December 1998, the federal dead line passed for tanks to meet regulations intended to keep them from leaking or for them to have some kind of release detection system so a leak wouldn’t go unnoticed. “An underground tank can be leak ing for years and people don’t see what’s going on,” Shrader said. “And if somebody doesn’t really keep up with their inventory records - how much they’ve put in the tanks, how much they’ve pumped and sold, or maybe an emergency generator tank, where it’s not used that often.... These things could be leaking for years,” he said. Since the federal government’s man date, though, the number of leaking un derground storage tanks has been de creasing, Shrader said. The state pays for tank cleanups through the State Underground Petro leum Environmental Response Bank. SUPERB was created as insurance for tank operators after the federal govern ment required each one to have $ 1 mil lion of coverage to pay for possible cleanups. SUPERB is funded by an en vironmental impact fee, which is half a cent of the tax on gasoline. SUPERB doesn’t cover releases from the federal government^ tanks, such as those at Fort Jackson, nor does it cover the Savannah River Site, which is cov ered by the Department of Energy. SU PERB is responsible for about 3,840 of the 4,000 open releases today. Since 1986, when DHEC was put in charge of regulating underground stor age tanks, about 7,400 confirmed releases were reported to the agency, Shrader said. “That’s where somebody has said, ‘I’ve lost more than 25 gallons of gaso line that I can clean up in a day,”’ Shrad er said. Of those 7,400, 3,400 have been closed, leaving the 4,000 releases today. As of December 1998, DHEC would have needed $127 million to clean all 4,000 leaks, Shrader said. The agency takes in about $1.1 million a month, he said, which means it has to prioritize which leaks to clean up first. The leaks fall into one of eight cat egories. Class 1 is considered emergency, and of the 234 leaks in Richland Coun ty, six are in that category. In a Class 1 situation, water is being contaminated. Seven tanks are in the next level, where the threat to human health or the environment is predicted to be less than one year. Eleven leaks have been within 1,000 feet of a drinking well. Seven leaks are predicted to be a threat to human health or the environ ment within one or two years. Eighty-nine releases have happened in shallow ground water with migration expected. Thirteen leaks are expected to be a threat to human health or the environ ment in more than two years. Twenty five releases were in shallow ground wa ter with minimal migration expected. Data is inconclusive for 76 releases. There are two ways DHEC finds out when a leak is contaminating drinking water. The agency has monitoring wells that it uses to check contaminant levels. If they find through routine monitoring that a well or lake will be affected, they set a cleanup level and clean the site be fore the drinking water can be contam inated. Other times, someone whose wa ter tastes funny will call DHEC, which takes a sample of the water and sends it to a lab for testing. The agency provides clean drinking water in the meantime by using filters or by connecting to the city water supply. A small gasoline leak can have big consequences. “One tenth of a gallon per hour leak would release 876 gallons per year into the environment,” Shrad er said. The main concern is benzene. “Ben zene is a carcinogen that is known to cause cancer, and it has a very low can cer-causing level... so if you clean up the benzene, you will clean up all the others to levels where they are not a problem or will not cause cancer,” Shrad er said. Shrader said DHEC has started an initiative to identify tanks so they can prevent storage tanks from contaminat ing water. “We are going out with Global Po sitioning Systems, and our Bureau of Wh ter Quality is GPSing, or getting the lon gitude and latitude of, public drinking supply wells and intakes. We are GPS ing the tank locations.... So we feel like we’re really being proactive here,” Shrad er said. ‘ JjCOUC^P B 06 ex' Briefs ■ City Council Columbia City Council meets the first and third Wednesdays of each month at the City Hall Council Chambers, third floor, 1737 Main St. 4 ■ County Council Richland County Council meets the first and third Tuesdays of each month at the County Administration Building, 2020 Hampton St. ■ First Steps County Meetings announced The public is invited to attend any First Steps County Meetings, which will be held by county as follows: • Barnwell - 7 p.m. Tuesday, Barnwell Ele mentary School Auditorium. • Cherokee - 7 p.m. Thursday, Cherokee County Libarary Conference Room, 300 Rutledge Ave., Gaflhey. • Greenville - 7 p.m. Tuesday, Greenville High School Auditorium. • Lancaster - TBA Thursday, USC-Lancast er. • Oconee - 7 p.m. Thursday, United Way Center, Seneca. • Spartanburg-7 p.m. Tuesday, Spartanburg Methodist College, Camak Auditorium. • Union- 5:30 p.m. Monday, USC-Union. • York- 7 p.m. Thursday, City of Rock Hill Council Chambers, City Hall. For more information about these organiza tional meetings, call Nina Brook at 734 9411. ■ City Chamber of Commerce holds annual meeting Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce Annual Meeting, today at Seawell’s. For more information, call 733-1116. ■ Peking Opera, Chinese folk dance “A Celebration of the Moon Festival," a free public performance of traditional Chi nese folk dances and Peking Opera. 3 p.m. Sunday, Gambrell Hall auditorium. For more information, call Dr. Tan Ye at 777 6908. ■ Photography exhibit “Lord, 1 .Wish I Had a Prayin’ Church Tonight,” a photography exhibit by Stanley Lanzano depicting small African-American churches in the state. Through Oct. 10, McKissick Museum. For more information, call 777-7251. Che Carolina Reporter Publisher Judy VanSlyke Turk Reporters Shana Bowman David Cloninger Rebecca Cronican Gina DeMillo Judson Drennan Ashley Mathias Ryan Mosier Cara Pellatt Jeff Romig Jeff Stensland Managing Editor Kristin Freestate Editors Allison Aiken Jessica Barfield Ann Kennedy Israel Kloss Todd Money Kate Maxwell Noelle Orr Jacquelyn Poston Adrienne Thompson Faculty Advisers Scott Farrand Keith Kenney Pat McNeely Henry Price Jennifer Wood The Carolina Reporter senior semester students pro vide The Gamecock with week ly Metro & State coverage. For Metro & State news tips, please call (803) 777-3307 or (803) 777-3248. To fax tips, please call (803) 777-4103. Letters to the editor regarding Metro & State coverage should be directed to The Gamecock, RH 333, or gcked@sc.edu. The Carolina Reporter Online can be found on the World Wide Web at: www.four.sc.edu/reporter/home.html t i