Suncor Tar Sands Refinery Leaks in Colorado

Folks who advocate tearing up farmland in Union County and replacing it with a tar sands oil refinery should take a look at this news from the Denver area, where a Suncor oil refinery is leaking black goo into the ground, Sand Creek, and the South Platte River:

The spill was discovered on Sunday morning by Trevor Tanner, a fisherman who saw sheen on the South Platte River and said the area smelled like a gas station. In his account:

I walked several hundred feet up Sand-Creek and there was an oil sheen the whole way and there was even a weird milky chocolaty sludge trapped in the small back-eddy below the confluence. My fly smelled like gasoline. My fingers smelled like gasoline. I could see micro-currents and upwells in the water column that you usually just can't see. Something was terribly wrong.

When Mr. Tanner found the hotline number and called it, the spill response coordinator initially wanted him to call back in twenty minutes. On Monday officials from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) arrived onsite and Suncor reported a leak. On Tuesday evening Suncor and EPA officials decided to dig a trench. This afternoon, EPA officials announced that three small booms erected on a bank of Sannd Creek appear to be containing the oil and preventing further contamination [Anthony Swift, "Suncor Tar Sands Refinery Leaks Crude into South Platte River," NRDC Switchboard, 2011.11.30].

The Denver Post reports that this Suncor refinery has had other accidents and complaints this year. And Suncor still hasn't confirmed that it has found or capped the source of this latest pollution.

But don't be fooled. I'm sure Rep. Kristi Noem will defend this oil spill and the spills Hyperion would bring to South Dakota as simple costs of doing business. And she'll tell us that the EPA with all of its soil and water sampling and engineers trying to stop the spread of the spill is just trying "to do us all in... and close all our businesses."

Related: Senator John Thune is peddling TransCanada's grossly exaggerated job claims (see also Michael Levi's critique!) as he throws his support behind legislation to force the Obama Administration to rush its review of TransCanada's Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

Meanwhile, Rep. Noem appears to have suffered from an oil spill herself:

When kissing up to the boss just isn't enough, copy his tan.