Parts of Alberta oil spill may never be cleaned up

The Globe and Mail:

A sunny break from heavy wind and rain allowed crews to come out in force to battle an oil spill that has stained one of Alberta’s most important rivers – one that, environment officials warn, is likely to never be completely cleaned up.

Rough weekend weather and a flooded Red Deer River had impeded efforts to clean up a spill of 160,000 to 480,000 litres from a Plains Midstream Canada pipeline. But on Tuesday, a response team of nearly 200 workers set to work skimming, vacuuming and absorbing the spill.

It was difficult work, made worse by the high water that is hampering access to the 25 pools of oil that Plains crews have identified in back eddies along the 30 kilometres of river that stretch between the ruptured pipe and Lake Gleniffer, a reservoir whose dam has helped contain the spill.

In fact, the challenges of cleaning an oil-stained river are so great that it’s unlikely that all of the oil will be cleaned up. Some will deliberately be left alone to degrade naturally, an unwelcome prospect for those whose backyards and pasture lands along the Red Deer have been blackened from the leak.

Even light crude can take a long time to disappear, however. Last July, another pipeline ruptured below a river, spilling 240,000 litres of light oil into the Yellowstone River from a pipe owned by ExxonMobil, an accident that carries numerous echoes of the current Alberta situation. At one point, 1,000 people were involved in attempting to clean up the Yellowstone, in an effort that cost Exxon $135-million (U.S.).

But they could only do so much. In some areas, officials determined that it would do more harm to get to the oil – through building roads and driving in heavy equipment – than to simply leave it.

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