20,000 Gallons of Pipeline Oil Spilled

By Sam Howe Verhovek

SEATTLE — At least 20,000 gallons of crude oil have spilled from a corroded pipeline near Prudhoe Bay in northern Alaska, state officials said Wednesday, adding that clean-up crews were hampered by severe conditions such as wind-chill temperatures of 50 degrees below zero.

The leak has been plugged, and clean-up crews with giant vacuum trucks known as “super suckers” were deployed to gather the spilled oil, said Lynda Giguere, a spokeswoman for Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation.

The quarter-inch hole in the 34-inch-wide pipeline, about 650 miles north of Anchorage, was first detected last Thursday.

An official estimate of the size of the spill is not expected until later today, Giguere said. Clean-up crews have already recovered about 58,000 gallons (or approximately 1,380 barrels) of crude oil mixed with snow from the frozen tundra, she said, but she said there was no determination yet on how much of it was crude or how severe the environmental impact would be.

The largest spill on record along the 800-mile Trans-Alaska Pipeline occurred shortly after it opened in 1978, when vandals blew up a section, causing about 700,000 gallons to escape. The Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons when it ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989.

In 2001, a man fired his hunting rifle into the pipeline, creating a leak that forced about 285,000 gallons onto the tundra and led to a $7 million clean-up.

Authorities arrested the 37-year-old hunter and he was convicted on federal weapons charges, although it was not considered a terrorist incident. Pipeline operators say it had been shot at through the years at least 50 times.

The spill on the North Slope occurred in a “feeder line” to the main pipeline, causing a shutdown of that line but only a temporary drop in overall production. Alaska is a major source of oil for West Coast refineries.

The pipeline is supposed to be monitored for any evidence of a drop-off that could signal a leak in the system; and when a leak is detected, the pipeline is then shut off to limit the fallout.

Some industry watchdogs say the aging pipeline will be increasingly vulnerable to corrosion. “It’s like a garden hose going bad on you,” said Chuck Hamel, a former oil and tanker broker who runs a Web site that monitors Alaska oil development. “You patch one leak but then you’ll get another.”