# Texas tank leaks by decade — and why the 1990s dominate

> The 29,830 Texas LPST cases by the decade they were reported. Six in ten fall in the 1990s, and the reason is regulatory, not environmental.

## By decade reported

A reporting date is the date a leak was found, not the date it began. Everything about the shape of this file follows from that.

| Reported in | LPST cases | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 1970s | 3 | 0.0% |
| [1980s](/decade/1980.md) | 3,615 | 12.1% |
| [1990s](/decade/1990.md) | 17,926 | 60.1% |
| [2000s](/decade/2000.md) | 3,061 | 10.3% |
| [2010s](/decade/2010.md) | 2,603 | 8.7% |
| [2020s](/decade/2020.md) | 1,266 | 4.2% |

### Why the 1990s

Leaks are found when tanks are dug up, tested or replaced. The federal
deadline to remove or upgrade underground tanks fell in the 1990s, which meant
hundreds of thousands of them came out of the ground across the country in a
few years — and each excavation was an opportunity to discover a leak
that had been there for a decade.

So the peak measures **detection**, not deterioration. Reading
it as « the 1990s were bad » gets the causation exactly
backwards: the 1990s were when we looked.

The same logic explains the tail. Fewer cases now does not mean fewer tanks
— 43,173 are in use today — it means modern tanks are
double-walled and monitored, so failures are caught before they become
reportable releases.

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Página: https://lpst.pages.dev/decade/
Fonte: Leaking Petroleum Storage Tank Sites and PST Delivery Certificates — Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
Recolha: 2026-08-21