Canada-based TC Energy has recovered 2,163 barrels of oil mixed with water from the 14,000-barrel spill on a creek running through rural pastureland in Washington County, Kansas, about 150 miles northwest of Kansas City, said officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
EPA also said the company has recovered 435 barrels from the ruptured pipeline, to bring the total amount of oil and water recovered to 2,598 barrels, a figure also released by the company, according to a report with The Associated Press. The total spill was 588,000 gallons.
TC Energy and federal investigators have not yet identified a cause for the leak.
Sabotage has been ruled out, Kansas State Representative Lisa Moser said in a post online.
The December 7 rupture in Kansas forced the company to shut down the Keystone system, and it hasn’t said when it will come back online. It is using trucks with what essentially are large wet vacuums to suck out the oil. The company said the trucks are operating around the clock. The company and the EPA said no drinking water was affected, and no one evacuated in the aftermath of the spill.
“Our commitment to the community is that our response efforts will continue until we have fully remediated the site,” the company said in a statement.
The company used booms, or barriers, to contain the oil in the creek and also built an earthen dam to prevent it from moving into larger waterways. The EPA said the company built a second earthen dam to helps support the first.
Emergency crews work to clean up the largest U.S. crude oil spill in nine years, following the leak at the Keystone pipeline operated by TC Energy in rural Washington County, Kansas.
Source: Reuters
It was the biggest onshore spill since a Tesoro Corp. pipeline rupture in North Dakota leaked 20,600 barrels in September 2013, according to U.S. Department of Transportation data. The agency’s data also said it was the largest spill on the Keystone system since it began operating in 2010 and bigger than 22 previous spills on the system combined.
The spill prompted the U.S. Department of Transportation’s pipeline safety arm to order TC Energy to take corrective action.
It said the company must reduce the operating pressure by 20 percent inside the 96-mile segment running from Steele City, Nebraska, south to Hope, Kansas. It also said the company cannot restart operations in that segment without the permission of the pipeline safety regulators.
The company also must identify the root cause of the spill and submit a plan for finding similar problems elsewhere and conducting additional tests by early March.