Oil spill near Enbridge site under investigation

Enbridge continued clean-up operations Tuesday of a synthetic crude oil spill from a tank valve at its Edmonton terminal in Strathcona County the day before.

An undisclosed amount of oil flowed off Enbridge’s property into a neighbouring industrial site via a drainage ditch and was carried along by spring runoff into an unnamed creek, the company said in a release. On Tuesday, Enbridge said “virtually all” of the released oil had been contained and “almost all of the released product has been recovered.”

Crews used a boom to contain the synthetic crude oil and recovered it with vacuum trucks.

“A very light sheen that had been carried beyond these facilities from spring runoff has also been contained and is being recovered,” Enbridge said.

National Energy Board investigators are currently onsite to “verify that Enbridge conducts an adequate and appropriate clean-up and remediation of any environmental impacts caused by the incident.” The Transportation Safety Board of Canada said Tuesday it’s deploying a team of investigators to the spill. The TSB rarely dispatches teams to pipeline-related incidents, with none sent last year and only one in 2015. The agency, which investigates federally regulated pipeline infrastructure, did not provide specifics as to what prompted it to send a team to the Enbridge spill.

The spill is the second for Enbridge that the NEB and the TSB have responded to this year — the first being a leak of about 961,000 litres of light crude oil condensate from a pipeline on Feb. 17 in the same area. Enbridge said the February spill, which was initially estimated to be 200,000 litres, was caused by Ledcor doing work for TransCanada Corp. The TSB was investigating.