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Exxon Pipeline Ruptures under Yellowstone River: 150 Miles Polluted

State Senator Russell Olson thinks having more big oil pipelines running through our fair state is just great. Those oil companies pay lots of property tax and buy lots of electricity, don't ya know?

Maybe Russ would like to spend the Fourth of July along the Yellowstone River in Montana. He and the kids could come home stinking of oil and "ringed with brown slurry," thanks to a ruptured Exxon pipeline that has polluted at least 150 miles of waterway between Laurel and Miles City:

ExxonMobil spokeswoman Pam Malek said the pipe leaked an estimated 750 to 1,000 barrels of oil for about a half-hour before it was shut down. Other Exxon officials estimated as much as 42,000 gallons of crude oil escaped.

The oil slick started just east of the Laurel Bridge late Friday night and by 9 a.m. Saturday had reached Worden. By about 3 p.m. it had reached the Myers Bridge in Hysham. The pipe itself connects Exxon's Silvertip Line — which brings crude from the oilfields in northern Wyoming — to the Billings refinery [Rob Rogers and Susan Olp, "Ruptured Pipeline Sends Oil Coursing down the Yellowtone River," Billings Gazette, 2011.07.02].

From the time crews spotted oil on the river, it took Exxon half an hour to shut down the pipeline. County officials and state troopers rousted people out of bed to notify them and encourage them to evacuate. Increased tax revenue doesn't inspire me much when I can't get a good night's sleep.

Glenn Wells, who lives in the River Grove Estates near Mullowney Lane, said he was asked to leave his home by a Montana Highway Patrol trooper at 2:30 a.m. Wells, his wife and a friend went to the Red Cross center as it was being set up. Three families were at the center, he said.

"I still smell like oil," he said. "My whole house smells like diesel fuel. It was everywhere on the river -- an oil slick on Billings' West End."

A 600-foot-long black smear of oil coated Jim Swanson's riverfront property just downstream from where the pipe broke.

"Whosever pipeline it is better be knocking on my door soon and explaining how they're going to clean it up," Swanson said as globules of oil bubbled to the surface of the river. "They say they've got it capped off. I'm not so sure" [Rogers and Olp, 2011.07.02].

The Exxon pipeline is 12 inches in diameter. TransCanada's Keystone pipeline is 36 inches in diameter and pumps can pump 11,000 barrels of oil every half hour across the Missouri River at Yankton (that is, if TransCanada can ever get its pumping stations to stop leaking long enough to run the pipeline at full capacity). The planned Keystone XL pipeline will pump nearly 19,000 barrels every half hour across the Cheyenne, Bad, and White Rivers in our western South Dakota watershed.

Senator Olson likes to accentuate the positive. He needs me, and Exxon on the Yellowstone, to remind him that there are serious negatives to the slavish dependence on fossil fuels that his big-business-biased rhetoric supports.

3 Comments

  1. Travis E 2011.07.03

    See, the plan is to let the TransCanada come into SD for economic development for the next twenty years. HOPEFULLY the pipeline will burst. We can use millions of tax dollars to entice companies to come and pay them millions more to clean it up. After all they are contributing to economic development. Then we can set up another fund to encourage saboteurs to damage the pipeline to encourage more economic development. Imma genius.

    http://blog.nwf.org/wildlifepromise/2011/07/exxon-mobil-oil-pipeline-ruptures-under-montanas-yellowstone-river/

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