Posted on 05/25/2010 7:53:54 PM PDT by Eyes Unclouded
Several thousand barrels of North Slope crude oil spilled into a containment area along the Alaska pipeline Tuesday when an open valve at a pump station allowed oil to overflow a tank, the Alyeska Pipeline Service Company said. Alyeska said the incident took place about 10:30 a.m. (2:30 p.m. ET) during a planned pipeline shutdown while the company was conducting fire command and valve leak testing at the pump station.
The Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation said a battery failed to control the valve when power was switched from the main grid during Alyeska's tests. The valve has been closed, shutting off the flow, the department said, but the pipeline remains shut down. The department said the next steps would be to clean up the oil in the containment area, determine the cause of the problem and restart oil flowing in the pipeline. No oil has been reported outside the containment area.
Mark MacIntyre, a spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency in Seattle, Washington, said two EPA coordinators would arrive on the scene from Anchorage on Wednesday and have a report in the afternoon. The pump station is near Delta Junction, about 100 miles south of Fairbanks. Ayleska said the lined containment area that took the spill has a capacity of about 104,500 barrels. Ayleska also said there were no injuries and the pump station was evacuated. An incident management team and other responders were dispatched.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Bush’s fault!
Oh, also, Cheney’s fault too.
and Reagan’s fault, and Lincoln’s.
This crap doesn’t look like “an accident” anymore.
Great, just what we need right now. The wakos will be all over this. They will have all of us living in tepees before long.
No, this is Alaska so it is clearly Palin’s fault.
There’s some sh!t going on here.
If it went into a containment area, then it wasn’t a “spill”
But to a CNN reporter, every gun is an assault weapon.
Indeed.
Bump
Liberals want to stop all drilling anywhere in the USA -
there guy is in charge = no better time to make their move.
You people I swear...We have to quit drilling and bring ourselves down to the level of most countries when it comes to energy! Rationing, high prices and inflation are just being equal and fair./s
Agreed. Too many ‘coincidences’ involving oil.
Never let a good “crisis” go to waste.
Don’t know why you added the sarc tag.
“We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK,”
-President Obama
Obama’s all over this one.
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