Cleaning up the Yellowstone River oil spill

July 13, 2011 | Clean Water, Protecting Rivers, Restoring Rivers

Scott Bosse
Director, Northern Rockies

By now, most Americans have heard about the ExxonMobil oil spill in Montana’s world-famous Yellowstone River.  The spill resulted from a ruptured oil pipeline running under the bed of the river near the town of Laurel, about 150 miles downriver from Yellowstone National Park and 20 miles upstream of Billings, Montana’s largest city. 

While trout anglers can breathe a sigh of relief that the river’s blue-ribbon section escaped unharmed, the affected reach is home to cool water fish like sauger, bass and catfish; abundant wildlife; and scores of farms and ranches that tap the Yellowstone for irrigation water.

ExxonMobil officials speculate the spill occurred after weeks of raging floodwaters scoured the river bottom and exposed the pipeline to a rock or log.  It will probably be months before we know for sure.

At first, ExxonMobil claimed no more than 1,000 barrels, or 42,000 gallons, of oil spilled into the river.  But that estimate was based on their initial claim that they stopped the pipeline leak within a few minutes of detecting it.  Regulators have since learned it took nearly an hour for ExxonMobil to shut down the 12-inch diameter pipeline, which means the amount of oil spilled could be an order of magnitude greater than originally reported.

Sound familiar?

Since the Yellowstone spill happened on July 1, officials have detected oil as far as 240 miles downriver near the North Dakota border. 

If you read ExxonMobil’s news releases, you would be led to believe that the situation is under control and clean-up crews will scrub the riverbanks and streamside vegetation of every drop of oil.  You’ll hear how they have hired 600 clean-up workers, contracted with 39 oil recovery boats, and deployed 33,000 feet of boom and 160,000 absorbent pads. 

The reality is clean-up crews have recovered less than one percent of the spilled oil, and that number is unlikely to increase.

If I sound cynical, it’s because I worked on the Exxon Valdez oil spill cleanup more than two decades ago.  Correct that – I got paid to work on the cleanup – Mother Nature eventually did the job that 11,000 cleanup workers couldn’t possibly do.

Thus far, the spill’s impacts on wildlife have been negligible, Exxon Mobil assures us.  Only one dead duck was recovered, the oil giant reports, and wildlife rescue workers captured and cleaned oil from one toad and one garter snake before releasing them back into the wild.

The problem with such rosy assessments is that during the first week of the spill, wildlife rescue crews could only survey about one percent of the river’s banks, backwaters and islands due to dangerously high flows.

And as scientists who studied the Exxon Valdez oil spill learned, for every dead bird that was recovered, another ten birds likely died but were never found.  When it comes to juvenile fish, it’s virtually impossible to assess how many die from oil spills.

The good news is that compared to the Exxon Valdez spill – which fouled Prince William Sound with at least 11 million gallons of North Slope crude – or the BP spill – which spewed 168 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico last year – the Yellowstone spill is a relatively minor event and the river and its wildlife should heal quickly.

But that’s little consolation for the people who live downstream from the spill site.  They’ve had to cope with the nauseating stench of oil and the prospect of serious economic losses resulting from contaminated water supplies and oil-stained crops.

Hopefully, we can learn something from this spill in order to prevent even worse spills from happening in the future.  After all, the United States is crisscrossed by an estimated 2.5 million miles of pipelines that transport oil, natural gas and other hazardous liquids.  There are 88 places in Montana alone where pipelines cross under rivers or lakes.  More spills are inevitable – the question is whether we can reduce their frequency and severity to manageable levels.

One good place to start would be for Congress to pass comprehensive pipeline safety legislation that requires automatic shut-off valves on new pipelines, boosts funding for new pipeline inspectors, and increases fines on polluters.  In the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act.  In the wake of the Yellowstone River spill and an even more catastrophic pipeline spill in Michigan’s Kalamazoo River last year, it’s time for Congress to act again.

Pick up the phone and call your members of Congress today.  The U.S. Capitol switchboard phone number is (202) 224-3121.

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