Gas station sued for Broadway closures in Burlingame

Burlingame law firm Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy chose to move forward with the suit, filed Feb. 23, to seek an undetermined amount of damages for businesses that lost customers, revenue and inventory as a result of those outages and closures, attorney Nanci Nishimura, who is representing the plaintiffs, said. 

“My heart breaks for everyone negatively impacted by what happened,” Nishimura said. “It shouldn’t have happened, it did, and to me, it’s unfortunate — it could have been prevented. It should have been prevented. It could have been catastrophic.” 

Representatives for A&A Gas Inc., the fuel services operator who is named in the suit alongside fuel services owner Mash Petroleum, did not immediately respond to request for comment. 

“It was a major catastrophe for the local Burlingame Broadway district businesses,” John Kevranian, former president of the Broadway Business Improvement District and owner of Broadway business Nuts For Candy, said. “People who lost power were devastated, and people who had power were also devastated because of the emergency road closures.” 

In a subsequent investigation into the source of the petroleum, San Mateo County Environmental Health Services named A&A Gas Inc. and Mash Petroleum Inc., the fuel services operator and owner at A&A Gas & Mart located at 11000 Broadway, as responsible parties. 

That determination doesn’t confirm the owner and operator are the source of the fuel contamination, the county said previously, but makes them responsible for investigating and mitigating the contamination due to sufficient evidence that fuel contamination exists on the property. 

Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy chose to move forward with the suit, which involves more than 100 commercial businesses, per the case filing, because it seems clear A&A Gas Inc. and Mash Petroleum Inc. are the parties at alleged fault, Nishimura said. 

“Where else would it have come from that we know of now? A&A and Mash Petroleum would have to show they are, indeed, not the responsible party,” she said. “When you think about it, and based on our investigation to date, their underground storage tanks or gas storage tanks were leaking. They leaked gas, or gas-infused water, into the electrical vaults.” 

Per filings with the California Water Resources Control Board, A&A Gas and Mash Petroleum failed to submit a required remediation plan — an aspect of being named responsible parties for the leak — by the Feb. 6 deadline. 

The county will not be fining the parties for that violation and San Mateo County Health spokesperson Preston Merchant said he believes development of a remediation plan is back on track. 

“Sometimes it’s more of a process than a deadline,” he said. “We want to make sure compliance is achieved.” 

While no more additional information was available to share, Merchant said, county testing previously found the leaked fuel to be “more typical” of gasoline available for purchase, rather than older, deteriorated fuel. 

Though Nishimura said she couldn’t speak to the ongoing remediation and investigation between the county and A&A’s owner and operator, she did point to 56 open and resolved violations recorded by the California Environmental Protection Agency at the site over the years, including defective spill containers and a detected leak, per the complaint. 

The complaint alleges the defendants engaged in negligence, nuisance and ultrahazardous liability against two groups of plaintiffs — those that lost power, exemplified in the suit by Maverick Jack’s, and those that didn’t but still suffered revenue loss as a result of the incident, with Bonne Sante restaurant given as an example. 

“Times have been tough for commercial businesses as it is. For this to happen for so many days, to put them out of business while the weather was pretty nice and people were out and about … it was devastating for some of them,” Nishimura said. 

Kevranian, who said his business personally lost several thousands of dollars of revenue during the power and road shutdowns, believes that a great majority of impacted merchants will want to join the suit. 

“I think close to 100% of the businesses will join this,” he said. “Everyone was devastated, power or no power.”