August was a deep-clean month rather than a build-wide month. The Forms Team reworked North Carolina’s whole functionality testing set, sixteen forms covering piping, sumps, spill buckets, overfill, leak detection and cathodic protection. Two brand-new forms joined the library, and three more picked up the small fixes technicians had been asking for, like an N/A choice on every walkthrough question and line numbers you can actually type into.

The biggest change in PASS Opus this month is not a button. It is the course pages. We rewrote 29 of them, one state at a time, so each page names the agency that regulates tanks in that state and links to that agency's own page. Five platform fixes shipped alongside, and one of them stops a failed training from disappearing.

August was about protecting work done in the field and making records easier to find: smart forms that never quietly drop an answer, a new annual schedule that keeps its anchor, a map of which sites have no region, and an API that can finally write.

A tech finishes an inspection on a tablet and the result is on the record before he leaves the lot. Forty feet away, the last tightness test is a fax printout in a binder nobody can find. Same site, same Tuesday. Three shifts are running through this industry right now, none of them is reversing, and the cost of waiting is not the one most operators expect.

Class C operator training has no federal expiration date. That sounds like relief until you see what it means: nothing in the federal rule will ever tell you to look at a Class C record again. On a site that changes staff every few months, the list is the whole compliance program.

Ask an operator how long UST records have to be kept and most will say three years. The federal rule has at least eight different answers, and half the compliance year is already gone. Here is what to pull at the mid-year mark, how far back each record has to go, and what a walk around the site turns up that no file drawer can show you.

The PASS Forms Team shipped fifty-four new and revised forms in July, led by a complete twenty-four-form North Dakota suite and a nine-form Oklahoma refresh. New Minnesota notification forms, an annual cadence option on two New Hampshire forms, and a fillable line-test set round out the month.

July brought a round of improvements to PASS Opus focused on billing and enrollment. Company discounts now apply automatically, buy-and-assign lands every time, and public certificate verification links open reliably.

A big month across PASS Tools: two-date inspection scheduling with a new dashboard, Punch List dashboards for paperwork and action items, an iPad keyboard fix for smart forms, cleaner report PDFs, and more.

Operators assume one calendar covers every UST test. It does not. The required cycle depends on the test type and the state, and getting it wrong in either direction costs you money or your compliance record.

A hurricane will not ask whether your tanks are in compliance. The inspector who arrives after it will. Here is EPA’s before, during, and after disaster framework, and why every step on it is compliance work you already owed.

Operator training was the brightest number in EPA’s Mid-Year FY2026 report, climbing to 89.7%. But that figure counts only Class A and B operators — not the high-turnover Class C employees working the counter. Here’s the blind spot inside the report’s best number, and how to close it.

EPA’s Mid-Year FY2026 UST report is the first one we can set directly beside FY2025 — and the comparison is revealing. The national Technical Compliance Rate slipped two points to 60.9%, even as operator training rose to 89.7% and the cleanup backlog fell by 918. But the real story is the spread between states, from Missouri’s 96% to Indiana’s 19%. Use the interactive tool to pin the states you operate in and line them up side by side across every measure EPA tracks.

A working ATG isn't proof of compliance — the records are. This article walks UST owners and operators through what federal release detection and recordkeeping rules actually require, where compliance most often breaks down between equipment and documentation, and how the shift toward remote and continuous monitoring is redefining what "in compliance" looks like in 2026 and beyond.

Your technicians performed the test correctly — but if the paperwork doesn't survive state review, it doesn't matter. Learn the most common UST technician documentation errors regulators are actively flagging and what service companies can do to stop them before they become violations.

Closing an underground storage tank (UST) is more than a technical step—it’s a critical compliance decision with long-term financial and environmental implications. This guide outlines what operators need to understand before initiating closure, including regulatory requirements, risk considerations, and the key differences between removal and closure in place.