While there's certainly some cleanup for the crew to do (the article says it's already 20% done) this is still a relatively small spill and probably pales in comparison to the contamination already created by gas stations in the region.
Please correct me if I misread, but I thought the article said 20% of the oil was recovered, not that cleanup and restoration was 20% complete. Full restoration is rarely possible, and cleanup can take decades as there is a very long tail of activities.
About 1,6 km by 1,6 km. So 16 100 m run tracks or football pitches long sides. Albeit those can be 90 to 120 m for UK or 100 to 110 m for international...
So about 1/3 of a swimming pool or 5 rail cars worth
Not so bad really and safer than rail cars.
150,000 barrels a day gets sent by rail car.
Pipelines are certainly the better option. I’d say catching this one and shutting it down was a success story.
Too bad Biden killed keystone XL
60 square miles of devastated aquifer. Estimates for initial cleaning and restoring would be $1 billion USD. That’s just the emergency response.
The costs of 30 years of pumping and treating and disposing groundwater minimum are not known. 100+ years of groundwater monitoring. The land will never be able to be restored to its initial condition.
EPA’s guidance used to state that one gallon of petroleum can contaminate up to one million gallons of water. Unfortunately, sourcing specific federal data or risk assessments reflecting this magnitude has become difficult, as crucial information underpinning these kinds of impact and cost projections appears to have been purged from public EPA websites over the last few months. I guess you’ll just have to deal with this when you hide information.
>EPA’s guidance used to state that one gallon of petroleum can contaminate up to one million gallons of water.
That doesn't answer my question. How did you get the "$1 billion USD" figure? It's unclear how you go from "one gallon of petroleum can contaminate up to one million gallons of water" to "Estimates for initial cleaning and restoring would be $1 billion USD".
Moreover, if that's "up to" amount, then surely it only applies to the worst case, like if you dumped the oil directly into a river/ocean? The picture in the article shows there's no source of water nearby. That's not to say that it can't affect groundwater or whatever, but blindly applying "one gallon of petroleum can contaminate up to one million gallons of water" makes no sense.
> EPA’s guidance used to state that one gallon of petroleum can contaminate up to one million gallons of water.
This is a worst case scenario. It basically assumes all of the oil goes directly into a water supply - so at that point you're just calculating the dilution of benzene.
