LAUREL, Mont. ? State workers set fire to an oil-tainted logjam on an island along the Yellowstone River on Tuesday, the last of dozens of debris piles smeared with crude from an Exxon Mobil pipeline break that dumped 42,000 gallons of oil into the waterway.
Two employees of the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, Derek Yeager and Matt Wolcott, used drip torches to ignite the woody debris as Exxon Mobil contractors looked on.
With a blast of heat and a spiral of smoke, the fire spread quickly through the oil-soaked logs. Just a few hours later, the last of the flames were extinguished with a water hose that had been brought in to keep the blaze from spreading beyond the island.
"Whatever was there is gone now," Wolcott said of the oil in the logjam.
Elsewhere along Yellowstone, black stains from the July 1 spill near Laurel still can be found on trees and rocks near the shoreline and on numerous islands. Environmental regulators have warned that more damaging crude could re-appear next spring, when high waters stir up any oil trapped in river bottom sediments.
But after more than four months of cleanup work ? an operation that involved more than 1,000 people at its peak ? Exxon Mobil representatives and state officials said Tuesday that the emergency response to the July 1 spill is largely over.
"At this point we're just dotting the `i's', making sure it's all right," said Rick Lavold, an Exxon Mobil contract cleanup supervisor.
As he spoke, Lavold was working with another contractor to pull charred pieces of wood from Tuesday's burn out of the river. Stuffing the black material into trash bags in case any oil remained, Lavold added that remediation and reclamation work by the company will continue, including for agricultural areas marred with oil where farmers have worried about long-term damage to their land.
The Environmental Protection Agency has been gone since September, when most areas of moderate or heavy oiling had been addressed. That left the state Department of Environmental Quality as the chief oversight agency for the spill.
DEQ officials said in recent days that they appreciated Exxon Mobil's cooperation but that some of the damage could not be undone.
"The difficulty is you can't get everything, and you can't put it back to the condition it was before the spill," said DEQ deputy director Tom Livers.
The company plans additional soil and water monitoring, said Exxon Mobil spokeswoman Claire Hassett. She said the company has made a "start to finish" commitment to see the cleanup through.
Federal officials are investigating the cause of the spill. No fines or penalties for Exxon Mobil have been announced to date, although state officials have said those will be coming and that state pollution laws were broken.
Exxon Mobil disclosed last week that it expects costs of the cleanup and pipeline repairs to reach $135 million. That figure could be driven higher by a lawsuit filed by landowners who said they were dissatisfied with the cleanup.
The landowners' attorney, Cliff Edwards of Billings, said he will seek tens of millions of dollars in damages. Edwards said a dozen landowners are now involved in the lawsuit, four more than signed onto the original complaint.
"These aren't two-bit properties. These are large properties and large businesses and we have no satisfaction," Edwards said. "We've got resolve and we're going to take this through the court system."
roasted pumpkin seeds pumpkin seed recipe mark madoff disturbia ufc results nick diaz michael myers
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.