Site Selection and Environmental Assessment of Gas Stations Using GIS Analysis (Case Study: Tehran – Iran)

Leakage from underground storage tanks could lead to the contamination of soil and water resources. It could cause a wide range of environmental problems such as groundwater contamination. Tehran is a high danger zone with regard to the level of potential surface and underground water contamination with petroleum products by gas stations; nevertheless, the lack of a set of comprehensive and well-implemented policies and environmental considerations for the design and construction of filling station in order to curb associated with the environmental hazards on a large scale is easily appreciable, which has led to a significant amount of problems to prevail over the city. In this study, locations of 74 gas stations in Tehran were investigated. The distance between each station and nearest qanat shafts, qanat strings and substrings, public and private wells, canals, intermittent streams, and surface streams, as an important parameter in evaluating the level of risk of water contamination, was measured by locating water resources using municipal and topographical maps. Moreover, locations of gas stations were categorized into safe, warning, and danger zones. Due to its location, and a large number of important qanats and surface water resources, district 3 is more vulnerable to water contamination by filling stations; consequently, it was divided into 15 sub-zones for a closer examination of the environmental hazards posed by gas stations. Danger zones, where the risk of petroleum contamination by gas stations is high, were identified. Finally, GIS location analysis with regard to soil and water contamination was identified as a decisive parameter to determine the location of new filling stations; furthermore, some approaches to check or reduce the risk of contamination by existing stations have been discussed.

GIS, Environment assessment, Gas stations, Site selection.