WASHINGTON, Kansas—Cleanup efforts in Kansas continued this week following one of the worst oil pipeline failures in state history.
Canada-based TC Energy says the company had recovered nearly 12,000 of the 14,000 barrels of crude that spilled on Dec. 7, 2022, from the Keystone Pipeline into Mill Creek in Washington County.
However, the company said the cleanup is far from over as it works to determine the cause of the rupture that dumped 14,000 barrels—about 500,000 gallons—of diluted bitumen oil into Mill Creek, near Washington, Kansas (population 1,071).
“We know that the line was operating at the time of the incident. We have ruled out a third-party strike as the cause,” TC Energy said in a statement.
Hundreds of independent contractors, TC Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks officials will remain at the scene throughout the cleanup.
“Fourteen thousand barrels is a fairly substantial amount of release. It has significant concerns,” Randy Hubbard, Washington’s emergency management coordinator, told The Epoch Times.
“The first few days were a challenge. We’ve never been through something of this magnitude in our county. We have a tornado now and then, or wind storms. An environmental incident like this is a first for me.
“Initially, we were concerned about what resource requests they would have given the [small] size of our office.”
The rupture occurred at Keystone Pipeline System Milepost 14 in a sparsely populated area of Washington County. The system stretches 2,687 miles from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast.
Nearly 4 billion gallons of crude oil have passed through the pipeline since it became operational in 2010. President Joe Biden canceled another portion of the system—the Keystone XL Project—upon taking office in 2021.
TC Energy had 200 people working to contain the spill within hours of the accident, Hubbard said. Since then, the number of responders has swelled to more than 700.
Following repairs and inspections, the company completed a controlled restart of the pipeline’s Cushing Extension on Dec. 29, 2022.
“We’ve had no reported incidents since they’ve been here,” Hubbard said. “TC Energy has come in fully prepared and self-sufficient. They’ve been great to us.”
“For lack of a better word,” Hubbard said, the accident has been good for the local economy.
Washington’s Mayor Ryan Kerns agreed.
“From our standpoint, it didn’t affect anything [else] in the city of Washington,” Kerns told The Epoch Times. “We’ve had a little more traffic through town. Businesses have benefitted. Other than that, nothing was affected.”
Kerns said the company should bear the majority of the cleanup cost since there was “little the city had to provide.”
TC Energy public information officer Austin Staton said the company set up a two-mile radius around the spill site and checkpoints to control entry.
“It’s quite impressive the number of people that have come here to respond,” Staton said.
“Our priority is to make sure we completely remediate the site. We’re ensuring we get this cleaned up and return the site as good as we can for the landowners.”
Early reports were that nearly 100 fish and several animals, including a beaver and raccoon, died from the spill. TC Energy will work with state environmental agencies in rescuing and treating wildlife affected by the incident. Staton told The Epoch Times it was “too early to speculate” on the cause of the rupture or the cost of the cleanup.
“The pipeline’s restart is premature and irresponsible,” without knowing the root cause of the system failure, said Zack Pistora, a Kansas lobbyist for the Sierra Club.
“Four of the pipeline’s most significant spills occurred within the last six years,” Pistora said. “The earlier spills were all failures due to original material, design, or installation.”
“With spills becoming increasingly larger and more frequent, this pipeline is sure to fail again. It’s only a matter of when and how bad,” Pistora told The Epoch Times.
“TC Energy needs to give more detailed information on the cleanup. The company has indicated that the cleanup could take several more weeks, but we know from experience that spills like these usually take several months, even years.”
He said “time will tell” about the extent of the environmental damage, “but we know that area of Mill Creek will never be the same.”
Real estate broker Todd Burt of Burt Farm and Ranch Realty in Washington said the oil spill ranks among the worst in the United States.
“It happens. It’s just like driving down the street. Your chances of getting hit are so much. It’s just how it is. With so many miles of pipeline, you’re going to have soft spots,” Burt told The Epoch Times.
An EPA spokesman said the federal agency would oversee “responsible party assessment and cleanup actions” at the spill site.
An estimate of the environmental impact has yet to be made available.
