http://grist.org/climate-energy/nancy-drew-and-the-mystery-of-the-secret-oil-spill/
[Multiple links in on-line article]
Nancy Drew and the mystery of the secret oil spill
By Heather Smith
28 Mar 2014 9:07 AM
When oil spills across a national monument, and no one is there to see
it, does it still leave a mark?
Apparently a really big one, but one that still takes a while to find.
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah’s Bureau of Land Management
(BLM) just discovered four miles of oil damage in the Grand Staircase
Escalante National Monument — thanks to some thoughtful hikers who
stumbled onto the scene and photographed the evidence.
Normally, the monument looks like the backdrop of a motivational
calendar, but the area the hikers found was black and streaky. There
were black bathtub rings around trees and rocks at the level of the
spill’s highest reach. The overall effect was like that of a really
poorly executed Andy Goldsworthy installation, or the mess left in the
wake of the Cat in the Hat, if the Cat in the Hat were a wildcatter.
The issue of a four-mile oil spill in a scenic part of the country that
people actually go to great efforts to walk through raises some
interesting questions about the possible existence of unreported spills
in less attractive parts of America. Pipelines, which are often buried
underground, in out-of-the-way places, aren’t easy to monitor. According
to data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration
(PHMSA), remote sensors detected only 5 percent of the nation’s pipeline
spills between 2002 and 2012. Pipeline company employees reported 62
percent, and the rest — nearly a quarter — were reported by regular
citizens.
Some people whose property is close to pipelines they don’t trust have
taken it upon themselves to set up a sort of neighborhood pipe watch, so
that they have better odds of catching a spill when it happens.
According to a BLM spokesperson, the field team dispatched to the site
of the Utah spill reported that the flooding that carried oil through
the monument happened last fall, but that the original leak that first
released the oil could have happened years ago.
Where did the oil come from? According to the BLM, there’s only one
possible culprit: an oil field 10 miles away in the Upper Valley. That
oil field was set up back in the 1960s, when the land was public land,
but not super fancy national monument-type public land. That means it is
allowed to keep on producing oil — as a “pre-existing use.”
The field is operated by Citation Oil and Gas Corp, which hasn’t been
returning the BLM’s phone calls, but which did get busted by the state
Division of Oil, Gas and Mining (DOGM) for a leak from the same field
two years ago. By law, any oil spill into a park or waterway is
considered major, and requires notifying authorities within 24 hours,
but Citation didn’t report that leak, either.
Which raises the question: If you’ve got a leaky oil field with aging
infrastructure that just happens to be inside a national monument, how
do you go about bringing it into regulatory compliance, or, failing
that, shut it down? Both the Utah Department of Commerce and the PHMSA
say, basically, “Don’t look at us” – pipelines like the ones in the
Upper Valley field aren’t in their jurisdiction. The DOGM, which
intervened the last time, says that it’s not responsible for oil once it
leaves the oil well. It suggested getting in touch with the Forest Service.
All of which means that, even as we’re surrounded by tales of dramatic
oil spills in places like Galveston and Michigan, there’s reason to get
paranoid. If this administration is serious about pipeline safety, it
should be thinking about the oil spills that we might not be seeing, as
well as those that we are.
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