Topping Off on PH Gas Station News
For those of you who haven’t noticed the gaping hole next to the gas pumps at the 7-Eleven on the northwest corner of Preston and Forest, well, there’s a gaping whole next to the gas pumps at Preston and Forest. The reason, per 7-Eleven spokeswoman and Preston Hollowite Margaret Chabris, is so nothing goes boom.
“We are proactively replacing the underground gasoline storage tanks,” Chabris said. “We are replacing the current tanks, which are single-walled, with double-walled fiberglass tanks so we can continue serving customers and making sure we have a safe environment.”
The project will last 27 days, so expect the station to be fully functional by mid-April.
And speaking of storage tank replacement, the Shell station on the northwest corner of Midway and Northwest Highway is also having some work done. The station’s been closed for I’m not exactly sure how long, a month or two, and expect it to be closed two or three more. Ken Eason, who owns a string of Dallas-area fuel spots and, by coincidence, just started building a house in Preston Hollow, bought the Shell station in February. He’s sprucing it up, redoing the canopy, and adding a food mart with coolers, in a word, modernizing.
There are a couple of challenges arising from city zoning rules that allow existing structures to be changed but not rebuilt without a new permit.
“I can’t move the canopy even though I’m gonna reface it, because I’d lose the, you know, the city [zoning] stuff,” Eason said. “Actually I’m going to have to leave the back wall of the building where it is, so it’s going to go down like it’s a remodel rather than new construction, but that’s just to keep the permit the way it is. It’d be easier to tear it all down and start over.”
