Opinion ID: 1998556
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: History of the Property

Text: From the mid 1950s to the early 1980s the property at 800 East Main Street in Brownsburg housed a gasoline station. In 1994 the Brownsburg Fire Department found a petroleum leak from the underground storage tanks at the property and reported it to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management. Within a few months, the property owner, The Lovold Company (Lovold), removed the tanks and contaminated soil and cleaned up the property at a cost of $150,000. Lovold had purchased the property in 1985 from P & P Brownsburg Realty, Inc., and had never operated a gasoline station on the site. The chain of title revealed seven owners over the course of forty years prior to Lovold's purchase. From 1970 to 1980, the owner, Galyan's Brownsburg Inc., leased the property to Almond Oil (Almond). Almond in turn subleased the property to others who operated a retail gasoline station. Almond was a jobber or independent distributor for Shell from the mid 1960s to the late 1970s and supplied Shell gasoline to the Brownsburg station during the same time period. The record in this case on summary judgment does not contain many of the details of this relationship. We assume but cannot determine that Almond operated in a substantially similar way to Murphy Enterprises as described in Meyer.