Mark Toso spent nearly 30 years working as a hydrogeologist at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency where he also managed the agency’s Petroleum Remediation Program which cleans up sites across the state that were polluted by leaking underground storage tanks many of which contain leaded gasoline.
Last November, Toso filed a whistleblower lawsuit against the MPCA claiming he was retaliated against by his managers and chose to resign from his job after he questioned their handling of the underground polluted petroleum sites.
Since the 1980s there have been thousands of petroleum leaks pinpointed across the state, with many of them coming from underground gasoline storage tanks and Toso said the additives in leaded gasoline do not break down and, in his opinion, the best way to clean up a leaded gasoline site was by removing the chemicals.
Toso, in his lawsuit, said there are 5-thousand polluted sites across Minnesota that he claims the MPCA did not clean up properly, but rather chose to drill new wells rather than remove the chemicals and he told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS he spent five years warning his superiors that this was not an adequate process for eliminating the threat to future public drinking water.
“There is no thought about what’s going to happen in the future,” said Toso. “What’s going to happen if someone drills in a polluted plume? What happens if someone puts in an irrigation system next door and it pumps at such a high rate that it pulls the contamination this...
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