Officials suggest pipeline company hid problems after spill

U.S. prosecutors suspect a Wyoming company of potentially concealing problems with a pipeline that broke in 2015 and spilled more than 50,000 gallons of crude into Montana's Yellowstone River, fouling a small city's drinking water supply, court filings show.

The government is suing Bridger Pipeline for violations of environmental laws in the 2015 spill, which came after the line buried beneath the Yellowstone became exposed and broke when ice scoured the river bottom near Glendive, Montana.

The accident came a few years after an Exxon-Mobil pipeline spilled into the river near Billings. The spills helped put a national focus on the nation's aging pipeline network, which has continued to suffer high profile accidents including recent spills in Louisiana and Southern California.

A survey of Bridger's pipeline on the company's behalf in 2011 included a note that the pipe was buried only

1.5 feet beneath the ever-shifting river bottom. That would have put it at heightened risk of breaking.

But after the spill, prosecutors alleged, company representatives referenced a second survey when they told federal regulators that the pipeline had been buried at least 7.9 feet, giving it “adequate cover” to protect against spills.

“This raises questions — which Bridger has yet to answer — about whether Bridger concealed material facts about the condition of the crossing before the Yellowstone spill,” assistant U.S. Attorney Mark Elmer wrote in court documents. the practices, according to a statement from the regulator Thursday. The card program serves 12 states, including California.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also fined the company $100 million, accusing the bank of “botching the disbursement of state unemployment benefits at the height of the pandemic.”

The CFPB said its order would require consumers to be reimbursed.

“Bank of America automatically and unlawfully froze people's accounts with a faulty fraud-detection program and then gave them little recourse when there was, in fact, no fraud,” the CFPB said in a separate statement.