Company responds to weekend oil spill
ROWATT AREA — A Saturday spill at Enbridge’s Rowatt pumping station led to a temporary shutdown of that facility as crews worked to clean up the site.
On Sunday, the immediate area around the pumping station, located just south of Regina, was busy with activity as various contractors worked on the cleanup and inspection of the site.
“We’ve got the vac trucks out sucking up any free product that’s contained within the station yard itself,” said on-site Enbridge spokesman Les Scott on Sunday. “And then out, there was some mist because of the wind that we had and so they just cleaned up the mist by getting rid of the snow and taking it back into our yard, into a holding area in the yard in Regina.”
According to information released by Enbridge, the spill happened late Saturday morning, resulting in the estimated release of up to 125 barrels worth of oil — an amount Enbridge noted is “subject to revision.”
As of Sunday, there were no updates on the final amount believed to have been spilled, although Scott said he doesn’t think the final amount will be “anywhere close to that.”
Field personnel were dispatched to the scene immediately on Saturday, ensuring all free product and the source of the spill were contained. Cleanup crews have been working steadily since.
“We go at it as hard as we can to get it done as fast as we can so we can get back to regular work,” Scott said.
Enbridge said there is no impact on the public, wildlife or waterways from what Scott described as a “very rare” incident. Although winds carried some spray onto an adjacent farm field, it landed on the snow, making for a fairly simple pickup.
“They just clean up the snow and then after that’s all cleaned up, then they’ll just do some soil sampling just to make sure that there’s no residue left out there,” he said.
As crews deal with inspecting and cleaning the area, others are working on investigating the cause of the spill. In the meantime, the Rowatt station has been shut down, creating a bypass of its section of Line 67 so that oil can continue to flow through the remainder of the line, known as the Alberta Clipper.
Scott said one of the first calls upon spotting the spill was to Enbridge’s regulator, the National Energy Board. Someone from that body came out on the weekend to have a look at the site, Scott said.
He said there’s no way to know just yet how long the investigation will take, and therefore no way to know how long the pumping station will be down.
“We have to know that we’ve found what went wrong and when everybody’s satisfied that it’s ready to go and the National Energy Board, our regulator, is satisfied with it, then everybody gets the OK and it gets fired back up,” he said.
Scott added that it’s also too early to say what the financial impact is likely to be on Enbridge. Right now, he said the company is focused primarily on cleanup and “getting it all figured out exactly what went wrong and why, and make sure we fix it so it never happens again.”
Enbridge said Line 67 — a crude oil line that is part of the Enbridge mainline from Alberta to Wisconsin — moves 449,000 barrels per day.