Environmental Justice – Underground Storage Tanks (UST) and Leaking UST (LUST)
This indicator reports the count of LUSTs (multiplied by a factor of 7.7) and the number of USTs within a 1,500-foot buffered block group. Areas with higher UST scores are placed higher in percentile (national ranking). The percentile could be interpreted as, for example, for a place at the 80th percentile nationwide, 20% (i.e., 100 minus the percentile) of the U.S. population lives in a block group that has a higher value.
The EJ Index for Underground Storage Tanks is a combination of this environmental indicator and the Demographic Index (the average of percent low-income and percent people of color).
Data are acquired from EPA’s EJScreen dataset, 2024.
Source
Source Description
EJScreen is an EPA’s environmental justice mapping and screening tool that provides EPA with a nationally consistent dataset and approach for combining environmental and demographic socioeconomic indicators. An EJ index combines demographic factors with a single environmental factor. For example, the EJ index for traffic proximity is a combination of the following populations residing in the Census block group:
- The traffic proximity indicator;
- The low-income population;
- The people of color populations.
Note that an EJ index does not combine various environmental factors into a cumulative score — each environmental indicator has its own EJ index.
The EJ index is higher in block groups with large numbers of mainly low-income and/or people of color residents with a higher environmental indicator value.
For more information, please visit the EJScreen website.
Methodology
This indicator reports the count of LUSTs (multiplied by a factor of 7.7) and the number of USTs within a 1,500-foot buffered block group. It quantifies the relative risk of being affected by a LUST for a block group.
The UST score is derived by the weighted sum of active LUSTs and sum of active and temporarily out of service USTs within a certain distance from a block group, using the following equation as
where the 7.7 multiplier is derived from the average number of active USTs divided by the average number of LUSTs in the U.S. backlog (cleanups remaining) from 2011-2020. A 1,500-foot buffer is used as a radius of influence for the Benzene plume migration to encompass USTs/LUSTs near block groups that could potentially be affected by a release. Underground Storage Tanks source is derived from EPA’s Office of Underground Storage Tanks on July 7, 2022.
The percentile in EJScreen is reported as what percent of the U.S. population lives in a block group that has a lower value (or in some cases, a tied value).
The relevant EJ Index is calculated as:
where Normalized Environmental Indicator is the percentile of the particular environmental indicator source data.
For more information about this indicator or the methodology of EJScreen, please refer to the EJScreen Technical Documentation.
This indicator is available at the following subscription levels:
- Premium (currently viewing this indicator and report combination)